Because they know most will put up with it, just like users. At least, in my view. I've moved from Reddit (user, not a mod), but i think we're fringe. Reddit is going to be humming along like normal soon enough as long as they don't severely upset the average user.
TBH, thinking back i'm kinda shocked Digg managed to die over this stuff. Was it just a different audience back in those days? Has Reddit reached a different more apathetic audience? Or is Reddit just not upsetting people as much as Digg did?
Clearly the internet has continued to grow more mainstream which brings a larger, alternate audience. I'm just speaking to the idea of why Digg failed and why Reddit won't (in this pass at least).
By the time Digg did their redesign, Reddit was already getting something like 250 million page views a month. Reddit was a clear alternative to move towards. Today, there is no clear and large alternative to Reddit, as Reddit was to Digg.
In almost all of the subs I've seen doing this, there were days of polling and discussion ahead of time, with the users themselves demanding the blackout.
A lot of people claiming that the moderators are producing the content when they are more like editors in the scheme of things. Non-moderation redditors are the one producing the bulk of the content.
So I'm saying that the moderators consolidating their whole sub's voices into the voice of the moderator is analogous to how reddit is telling everyone how the site as a whole must be used.
Couldn't agree more. This is a flagrant abuse of power by mods. I hope this is a wake-up call to major companies never to let your employees unionize because the employees don't care about you or your company - they'll kill it just to spite you and then move on to the next company.
What a bullshit take. Employees only tend to unionize when companies don't give a shit about them. Companies that treat employees like people and pay them fairly have much less to worry about
> the employees don't care about you or your company - they'll kill it just to spite you and then move on to the next company.
Ah yes, this is in contrast to the benevolent employers who deeply care about each and every employee and would never lay them off just to buy another ivory backscratcher for the CEO.
On the one hand, I think this a stupid decision for Reddit, that it's disrespectful and very bad for the internet.
On the other hand, if it's what they're going to do, then that's how it is. You can't really expect them to just leave a namespace like, say, /r/politics in the hands of someone who openly says they aren't going to use it. So of course they're going to remove mods who stick to a blackout, what else could they do? At the end of the day it's their site and everyone's free to leave if they don't like how it's run. This was always the problem with making a home on Reddit, some of us have been saying so all along.
(PS: Please understand that Discord is going to have a moment like this. Maybe in two years, maybe in five, but it'll happen. It is inevitable.)
If you want to change the license for FOSS software like the Linux kernel, you need to get approval from _every_ contributor. To me, this means for a sub to shutdown as they have they would need permission from _every_ subscriber.
I can take your GPL code and never show it to anyone any more, that doesn't violate the license. I also don't have to publish GPL code indefinitely simply because I showed it to you once. Terrible analogy.
reddit moderators have an unbelievably inflated sense of their worth, which is why they thought this blackout was going to accomplish anything in the first place.
I assure you, there is a line around the block of people clamoring to become mods. There's a reason its nigh impossible to become a mod of a big sub, the people that are doing it really like doing it and dont want more people joining to dilute their share of the power.
But many subreddits took a vote before taking action, so it's not like the moderators did this out of the blue.
The subreddit model seems to me to work as a combination of moderators setting and enforcing some rules, users submitting content (hopefully good) and users upvoting and commenting on content.
If the mods are wrong on all of this, then the users who voted to blackout either weren't contributing much or will back down and things will go back to business as usual.
But it's also possible that replacing the mods will just lead to many of the users who voted to blackout taking further action. A subreddit without content or with protesting users posting spam isn't fixed by adding more mods.
>reddit moderators have an unbelievably inflated sense of their worth
If moderators were inconsequential Reddit wouldn't be trying to hire and fire them.
>I assure you, there is a line around the block of people clamoring to become mods.
The willingness of others to do the same work doesn't make what someone does inconsequential. Would you say an NBA player is inconsequential because you could find a million people who would like to play in the NBA? Obviously being a Redditor moderator and being an NBA player are two different things but by how you are valuing based on willingness to replace, an NBA player would be more inconsequential than a Reddit moderator.
I think it's likely that at least some of the reason they don't add more mods is that it's hard to find and vet good mods, so there's an element of risk in adding more mods.
> If there are mods here who are willing to work towards reopening this community, we are willing to work with you to process a Top Mod Removal request or reorder the mod team to achieve this goal if mods higher up the list are hindering reopening. We would handle this request and any retaliation attempts here in this modmail chain immediately.
> Our goal is to work with the existing mod team to find a path forward and make sure your subreddit is made available for the community which makes its home here. If you are not able or willing to reopen and maintain the community, please let us know.
Kinda crazy how a lower mod can request a higher mod's removal. Pretty unhealthy precedent for a community where mods are already power hungry lunatics and your most obsessed power hungry mod who spends all day needlessly moderating the subreddit can appeal to reddit with "look how much more active I am than him; he barely does anything! So, gimme the subreddit pls."
> mods are already power hungry lunatics and your most obsessed power hungry mod
I mean, here you are just describing the mods that are holding these subreddits hostage. It seems appropriate for reddit to return these to the community in the case where the obsessed power hungry mod's behavior goes against what the community wants.
r/NewOrleans and r/SaltLakeCity voted to end it. There has also been rampant brigading from the pro-blackout side (see r/magicTCG, in addition to a Twitch stream brigade users on r/freemagic talked about voting in the poll despite being banned from r/magicTCG). I’m curious how r/FanFiction will go since they’re doing much more robust polling with karma requirements to stop brigades.
There’s been brigading from both sides, it’s just more noticeable when it’s an outcome you personally disagree with. I’m having to remind myself that just because a) my subreddit has someone who’s never posted there vehemently arguing to stay open and b) staying open is winning the poll, that doesn’t mean it’s a brigade.
(There would be more people voting if it was a brigade, so I’m pretty sure it’s not. But emotionally it bugs me.)
They are still running the show. Making your subreddit private is, or at least used to be, a perfectly legitimate way of running things. Remember, reddit added that feature to their website.
Classic attempt to break a strike. Would mods be employee, this would be illegal (at least in France). This shows how Reddit the company think how the people who work for them for free on Reddit the platform and make its value.
My mind immediately went to strike-breaking too. This isn't quite the same as they are targeting a volunteer group that has shown no interest to form a union, but this is so obviously a play out of the union busting handbook. Divide the group, make it seem like only a few select leaders want whatever they are negotiating over, and offering to elevate cooperative people into positions of power if they are willing to participate in a coup.
I think it’s something different than a strike and should thus not have any legal protections. Strikes are fair in some sense because workers aren’t being paid during that time (or at the very most by the union coffers) which goes up against the company’s ability to weather the lost revenue during the strike.
In this case, mods can keep subreddits dark without any cost to themselves because they aren’t being paid by Reddit. It’d be like if library volunteers protested by closing the library and stopping any new volunteers from entering by installing a lock on the door. OFC the library is within their rights to break the lock to let other volunteers in.
Mmmm I have an issue with the specifics of that metaphor applying to Reddit, but in general, people volunteer because volunteering brings them some non-monetary benefit, so I see it as basically the same dynamic. Of course you can’t lock the doors, just like you can’t physically obstruct/harm scabs.
In the near future when AGI eliminates scarcity (2025?) this will have to be litigated!
Mods don't work for Reddit. They volunteer for Reddit moderation. Much like you can volunteer to be the leader of the DND club at a local hobby shop. They are not an employee. People who don't like what Reddit is doing should stop showing up. Mods who don't like it should stop moderating. It's as simple as that, if enough people agree, Reddit will be no more.
It was hostile by mods to close a sub like r/nba the day after the finals, and hostile to close an important sub like r/science. A poll with a small fraction of the users that was only up for a few hours and potentially brigaded doesn't mean the majority of actual users wanted those subs to close.
Open for a couple days in advance and only for members of that sub. The indefinite one should have opened up for a new vote. Maybe r/nba could have provided a link to an alternative sub for discussing the nba finals on Monday.
The club isn't IPOing. The real estate investment trust that hosts the DND club is. Ironically the REIT's main appeal to investors is that it's popular with DND clubs.
>Mods don't work for Reddit. They volunteer for Reddit moderation. Much like you can volunteer to be the leader of the DND club at a local hobby shop. They are not an employee.
DND has no control over people doing DND at a local hobby shop, but if Reddit gets directly involved in hiring and firing and other such management of free labor then it is setting up to be viewed as an employer. There are many differences between an unaffiliated 3rd party club and direct corporate involvement in personnel management where the more Reddit tries to manage its free labor, the more it runs the risk of running afoul of FLSA. Under labor law there is a difference in working for free for a non-profit, government, etc versus a for-profit entity where they are not the same when it comes to providing free labor and FLSA rights cannot be waived away.
The analogy appears fitting at first glance, but it's crucial to note that the moderators in question aren't simply choosing to abstain from their duties—they're actively hindering others who might wish to take up those responsibilities.
I may not be an expert in French law, yet an analogy that comes to mind would be envisioning workers of a grocery store who've decided to go on strike. But rather than merely expressing their refusal to work, they also opt to seal the store's doors, blocking customers from entering.
Of course, customers might find the current situation unfavorable due to the absence of employees (think of barren shelves, paralleling communities overpopulated with off-topic discussions). Management, too, would likely find the situation objectionable due to a lack of employees to ensure transactions are being made legally (equivalent to the absence of moderators who uphold site rules, a scenario potentially hazardous to Reddit). Even though management might be compelled to shut down the store under these circumstances, it's essential to remember that closure remains a management prerogative, not a decision for the striking workers.
It sounds to me like there are Top Mods who want to continue the boycott, with others who don't and that Reddit is looking at giving the other mods a path forward.
One of the things I have noticed is that the boycott is not from the users but from the mods of the community. Even if the community had a vote, if you want to boycott fine but they are forcing others to go along with with them.
So either they are not the majority or they feel that the community has such little willpower to continue the boycott that they must force them to take part.
That is (1) not true and (2) meaningless given most of those polls were brigaded by a small set of vocal whiny users voting in subreddits they aren't even involved in (3) even given both if those, I doubt you can find a poll for a large subreddit that shows even 10% of users supporting a blackout.
r/freemagic users who were banned from r/magicTCG talked about voting in the r/magicTCG poll. Apparently, mods of r/tennis posted in a Discord asking people to come help and vote to support the blackout as well. A lot of polls were mentioned in r/ModCoord which biases strongly in favor of the blackout. There’s much more incentive to brigade on the blackout side since users who don’t care about the subs in question lose nothing by those subs going private.
Eh, I gave you the clear out under #3 where you could show that these blackouts were really the will of the people. You haven't done that, if your strongest argument is about "oh, prove there was brigading", I think we're at the point where, at best for you, any polls are basically just meaningless (if they were meaningful you could use them under point #3 to refute me).
The same is true for the mods. Mods don't own subreddits, the community does. If they want to close down communities that aren't theirs, why not just quit Reddit? They are free to stop moderating.
No, just the ones that people are strongly motivated to brigade, and ones where I saw discussion of discord groups where links to such polls were posted to mobilize brigaders. But none of that should matter. If you claim your poll is representative, you need to demonstrate it. Don't make claims that outpace your evidence. It's not that hard.
Ask yourself, who told you that was true? The strikers? Or the guy with the vested interest in breaking the strike and desperate to find anyone -- literally anyone -- to cross the line?
I guess the trick would be to flood Reddit with requests from allied mods that will keep the sub closed anyway. Presumably Reddit doesn't have the bandwidth to really vet these requests.
This is the way. Especially if the action can be more unpredictable than simply taking the subreddit private. Maybe remove all new posts or something.
If you can turn all of the subreddits into tens of thousands of problem children for Reddit that they can’t fix with automation, they will be unable to cope.
500 million monthly users isn't a community. I certainly don't have any subreddits that are this large nor do I give a shit about how many users are on a particular website. My reddit communities are niche and skill-based. We'll go wherever we go. Oh no! The giant horde of September stays behind on Reddit! Quelle horreur.
The thing is: By being on reddit the barrier to enter a small niche community is low. Having to register with a new account, when maybe the favorite username is taken already is a barrier, even if it takes just few minutes.
wait that’s the opposite: reddit uses a flat username space, whereas the federated ones have a hierarchical namespace that reduces collisions. there can only be one “johannes” on Reddit, but right now there can be 200-300 “johannes” on Lemmy (rendered “johannes@<remote_instance>” when viewed from a foreign instance).
Assuming Lemmy will be "the winner" currently it is a small player, where differ etc instances already stop federating each other, thus splitting the community early.
If not at each forum I have to decide which variant of my name I pick and then remember. On reddit I could take that choice once for a huge number of forums. (as long as I was willing to share identity over different subreddits)
there's also kbin, and you can post/read from either with any Mastodon/Pleroma/Misskey account just with a worse UI. i'd be surprised at this point if the winner isn't just Activity Pub with some thin layer on top.
> different instances already stop federating each other, thus splitting the community early.
instances usually provide at least some reason when they defederate with each other. maybe users will learn to be cognizant of who they're associating with when they pick an instance. i've seen that with tech-literate friends joining Mastodon who pick a 4chan-like unfiltered/unhinged instance as their home without understanding that such an instance causes outsized complaints compared to the "average" instance and will have less access to outside communities as a result.
i'm sure there's an opportunity for better admin/mod tooling -- hopefully some of the defeds that have happened in Lemmy recently will reverse once things settle down -- but i think even with that it has to be a new way of thinking both for users and operators about what it means to be a member of an instance. it seems that when you hand someone a magic knob they can turn between "less toxicity/abuse" and "broader reach", most will turn it further toward that "less toxicity" edge than Twitter or Reddit do themselves -- even if the tooling for it's so crude. i get why that worries people, but honestly, the benefits of that in other federated systems i use so far have been incredibly worth it (and the cost of migrating to a different instance overblown).
Lots of the alternatives seem to be missing the core idea of what Reddit really is (a community of communities). I think first and foremost it's the community aspect of Reddit that makes it appealing.
I've been building a platform called Sociables which is intentionally not just a Reddit clone. We are trying to create an all-in-one place for people to create communities and not just posts.
To be fair Reddit also is missing the core idea of what it itself is
Just think, one of Reddit's features for years was the "trending subreddits" list. Someone made that, someone else approved it. It got put on the front page, it became a core part of the experience. There were meetings!! Meetings where this was discussed. It was an OKR, maybe even of multiple people, was there a whole team?
But you and I understand that the essence of community is that you get a small group of people who interact and re-interact and who get used to seeing each other and who have fun doing this thing, whether it's shitposting memes or discussing God or something else. You grow past a certain size and now you are shouting into the void, which is the same experience you have every day, just go to your local pub and shout your hilarious comments at the TV and you'll have more listeners than your comments on a large subreddit.
"Trending subreddits," people literally came into daily stand-up, "Hi Jessica, how is the 'suddenly destroy Reddit communities just when they start growing and thereby make Reddit suck more' feature going?" "Well I ran into some roadblocks as the sudden influx of new users makes the statistics very hard to pull, I'm thinking of changing to a cron job that reassembles the list every hour." "Jessica, we've talked about this, making Reddit suck more is of top priority to my manager and my director, I don't care how you do it, just GET IT DONE and we can get a big bonus at the end of quarter" "I won't let you down, boss! Reddit WILL suck more by the end of this quarter."
I don't think it's still a thing anymore as-is but I don't think it was deleted for the fact that it was the make Reddit suck feature? I think they're still basically doing the same thing but just basically temp-autojoining users into those subreddits, "Reddit wasn't sucking fast enough when people had to opt-in to flashmobbing a promising community, now we're just going to shove the people in the door and scream 'you're a flashmob get to sucking!' and hope that works." More meetings were had on this!
Anyone can create a community. It's up to the community owners to decide the mod teams and moderation rules they want their community to abide by. We are looking at leveraging AI to assist the communities moderators.
Here's a list of the core community features:
1. Customizable discussion boards. Community owners can setup threaded discussion boards for different topics related to their niche. Say a user creates a community for a niche like "Cars", under that community they could create different discussion boards for sub categories like "Car-mods", "Car-photos", "Car-sales", etc. This is different from Reddit where typically you only have a singular discussion board per community.
2. Voice chatrooms. Community owners can setup Discord style voice chat rooms where users can communicate via voice.
3. Real-time text chatrooms. Currently we only have a singular chatroom for the whole community however we are looking at adding the ability to create multiple rooms per community.
3. Synchronized YouTube/Vimeo player. Community owners can create a playlist of YouTube/Vimeo videos. Their community's player cycles through the playlist and synchronizes the playback so people within the community can watch the same video at the same time.
4. Baked in monetization. Community owners can offer tiered monthly membership subscriptions that allows the members to support the admins and mods. Owners can also link their PayPal to receive donations. Also adding paid post bumps and comment awards that users can purchase where the revenue is shared with the community owner.
That’s actually quite a good idea. Reddit become increasingly shit as people join a subreddit. Being able to restrict new users to a specific subforum and have topic forums would cut down on the trash.
I was confused at first by the federated nature of Lemmy, but making an account was easy and I'm thoroughly enjoying it now.
The important thing to note – even though you join a particular Lemmy "instance", it doesn't particularly matter which one, because you can subscribe to communities (subreddits) from any instance.
Isn't there an issue with reddit banning certain communities? With the fediverse you can choose to be on an instance that doesn't block others or be on an instance that does block. For example, the instance I'm on defederates from 4 instances while beehaw defederates from 100+
Yes but if I recall correctly, whatever you are subscribed to you still see in your feed, even if it’s blocked by the instance. I may be incorrect and if so please correct me.
I think you're thinking about "limiting" another instance, where content from the limited instance is excluded from public feeds but still shows up in personal feeds to those who are subscribed.
Sadly limiting instances like mastodon can do isn't available in lemmy or kbin afaik, so highly moderated instances like beehaw are resorting to complete disconnection (defederation) for now until moderation tooling improves.
One caveat about the current implementations is that a defederated instance doesn't seem to know it's been defederated from, so a stale copy of the remote content still exists and can be interacted with (users can post in the remote community that defederated and comment on stale posts, or even new posts in the remote community that are made by local users, however none of that will get synced to the remote communities / instance that defederated).
> There’s just no way I could feel comfortable in a community that supports the right-wing nationalist Putin’s war on Ukraine, or outright denies the harsh repression meted out against Muslims in China.
Which makes up 50% of the article, to "it's slightly different than reddit"?
You could just join a different instance, like the article recommends. The bit you quoted is one paragraph out of 10, not "50% of the article". It's not like Reddit has never had ugly sub-reddits, especially earlier on when it was trying to be a bastion of free speech.
It's more like 3 paragraphs, but that's not really the point. It's one thing to have ugly subreddits / communities, it's another if the developers and the main instance is the ugly one. If one of the main issues of those federated networks is fragmentation, telling me to just ignore the main one doesn't bode particularly well.
Rumors of "tankies" running lemmy.ml gave me pause at first, but since it's a federated network with established independent nodes, it seems to me that a single problematic one shouldn't condemn the whole Lemmy platform (let alone the whole Fediverse, of which it is a part).
Alternative implementations would probably help as well. Kbin seems to be one. Given the sudden recent interest, perhaps we'll see more before long.
There's quite a few, and most of them federate with one another.
What's interesting is that Reddit isn't really a single community - Each individual subreddit has it's own moderators, editorial voice, group of people, etc. They can each move independently.
For example, /r/startrek and the related startrek websites have all moved to
https://startrek.website
This federates with Lemmy, kbin, etc - So if a user posts to startrek.website it shows up everyone else's servers, and people can reply from whatever federated site they use
There are dozens of alternatives to reddit, the issue is that the vast majority of reddit users don't care at all about this drama. Reddit is not going anywhere.
i’m less certain than i was. the two people in my life who actively use reddit have both told me “it’s over”. one of them joined lemmy.blahaj.zone after r/196 reformed over there: he told me that it’s the community he was most active in and i got the impression that unless the Lemmy one folds he’s more or less done with Reddit — even though it means he’s interacting with the other communities via different mediums than he was before (chat instead of forums).
as someone who stopped using Reddit a year ago, i get it. topical communities no longer exist in just one place. if you’re interested in 3d printing, say, you can join a reddit, join a chat group (in Discord, Telegram, Matrix — whatever app of choice), join a FB group or explore the topic on TikTok, find a 3d-printing themed Mastodon instance, …: and each one of these hosts adjacent communities. Reddit is no longer the only “community of communities” on the internet. if you zoom out, it’s been losing that moat for a while. users can get by decently well these days by choosing from 5+ apps they might already have installed when exploring a topical community. reddit killing their share of that app space doesn’t really help them.
I think Reddit faces more potential downside here than other similar platforms might, because of the popularity of third-party apps among key contingents of the site (particularly moderators), and also because of the missteps that management has taken dealing with the API changes. If they lose even 5% of their traffic to this debacle they've made a bad decision, IMO.
Me either, but like we saw on every twitter-clone attempted until now, it's really hard to make people move to another platform if the first one still online.
They’re gonna be left with bottom of the barrel mods. It’s a thankless task to begin with - a marginal proposition at best. Add some threats as a thank you for the unpaid work and it becomes downright abusive
Who the hell is going to want to mod in that context?
That's not exactly a list of people who are likely to do a good job.
I think that's part of Reddit's problem - They can replace the mods with random people if they want, but the likelihood that those people will put in the work and do a good job is not high.
> That's not exactly a list of people who are likely to do a good job.
based on what? is the control group the current mods because that's already a laughable set of people. there is no criteria before and there will be no criteria after.
This was my thought as well. To answer your question, though, I imagine bad faith actors of various flavors will be flocking the site:
1. Corporate marketing departments
2. Unpopular political/religious factions seeking to surreptitiously "move the needle"
3. Those who wanted to become mods before but didn't make the cut for completely valid reasons. Now they have an opportunity, only the quality will decrease as a result
Finally, I can fulfill my destiny of taking over r/television and banning anyone who says anything positive about a show with a laugh track. It should never have been allowed to begin with.
I always mix audience perspective because I usually stand in front of the drum kit when I see bands live. Do most people stand behind them? Am I doing something wrong?
Duly noted. Next time I mic up a speaker cab I'll stick the microphone where the guitarist's head is instead of on the speaker grill.
In all seriousness this topic falls squarely into the square of "strong opinion, weakly held" as far as I'm concerned - nobody except people like us actually cares. That being said I've yet to hear a cogent argument for the contrary position... I make music for the audience, not for musicians.
I think a rational argument for it is that stereo panning of drumkit elements are not something you can hear from the audience, and maybe even from the stage. Can anybody even remember having the "audience" stereo experience in real life? You'd have to be standing right in front of the drumkit.
Whereas drummers actually experience this panning configuration in real life, and when you're placing the mics in the mix, that's the set of ears you're trying to mimic, really because there isn't any _other_ set of ears to opine. And it's an important one because it provides the lion's share of the stereo image.
Speaking as a drummer and sometimes producer, the only people likely to have strong opinions about this are drummers. All of my drummer friends agree: audience mixes make some albums unlistenable on headphones. Nobody else will notice either way, so mix drummer perspective on the off chance that the drummers listening will appreciate it.
Live albums get a pass, of course. And yes, lefty drummers exist. If a lefty drummer wants their kit panned the way they hear it, that is of course fine.
More seriously, the other day someone spent significant time and effort trying to convince me that the new version of The Wonder Years featuring a black family was anti-white propaganda by The Jews. If he's a reddit user I'm sure he'd love to mod a sub with such a large community.
Ohhh, it's a new version of The Wonder Years... I had never seen the original show, but I was vaguely aware of it, and it was playing in the gym the other day and I saw the main characters being black and I felt like I was deep in the Mandela Effect or something.
I feel like the crazies ranting about "white erasure" are making it harder to criticize these race-reboots on the grounds they should be criticized for: laziness. Mediocre products where the selling point is, "we swapped races, give us points," remain mediocre and are unbelievably lazy compared to what we should see... which is new and interesting things with diversity baked in.
Unfortunately the hysterical racists are so loud and pervasive that this is yet another issue we see broken down in a Manichean battle to cover for a total lack of new ideas.
I just let it be "lazy" as you say as the rest of tons of other stuff is lazy and don't bother to think to much about it. I'd rather focus on stuff I actually like.
It's like calling a song lazy because it uses the same chords as another song. Gender/race-bent remakes are still entirely original works with new scripts and new shots. Even if they were to keep the script the same and make a shot-for-shot remake with new actors and a new crew, that's still 99% new work that's being done. I'd watch a shot-for-shot remake of something like Star Wars with a gender-swapped cast, that sounds like a lot of fun.
Ideas are worth very little, it's the execution that matters.
Rather than arguing with him about racism I tried explaining the commercial logic behind the decision, pointing out that advertisers would like to reach black consumers and if the original show was popular with a black audience then recycling the successful formula was a safer commercial decision than trying to build a new brand, but he kept going on about his heritage being stolen. I guess this means all the Fred Savage statues will have to come down.
I don't watch television much except for a little bit of news and local weather, but it seems to me there's always about the same number of family-centered sitcoms and dramas set in the present, about one's parents generation (nostalgia aimed at 30 something starting a family) and grandparents or older ancestors (mythmaking, culture reproduction). Sitcoms are like the McRib of television; they generally don't age well but since they come and go as the cast ages out it's easy to get teary-eyed at how great they used to be.
A lot of people end up as neo-nazis or similar because they're anxiety-ridden losers who take refuge in cosmic narratives. Aggressive and violent ones need punching, but lot of them are confused and need a way to vent to a non-judgmental person. Moralistic approaches tend not to be very effective ime - horse, water etc..
They already have tools to cut down based on silence. So, remove the laugh track to enable this silence, then cut based on the silence. If there was a filter for ffmpeg, you could just chain them together in a single command.
Comeon man. Sure, there's a lot of evidence that Ghislaine Maxwell was one of the elite super-mods and gently pushed acceptance of pedophilia, but it's all circumstantial at best
I think it’s a complete mistake to think Maxwell who definitely was a Reddit powermod gave a single shit about pedophillia or the girls she trafficked.
It was a blackmail operation. I am certain it was a means to an end.
Same as being a Reddit power mod. It’s about control.
They may not be entirely happy with each other, but they've developed with each other slowly over time, developed callouses, and generally worked out how to live with each other. Even if a mod here leaves and a mod there joins, the incremental changes to the community can be absorbed.
A complete replacement of the mod structure of a subreddit, especially a lot of subreddits at a time, will cause more chaos than you may initially expect. In ecosystem terms, imagine simply yanking out an entire species and trying to replace it by engineering fiat. Yes, eventually the ecosystem will resettle into some new equilibrium... but there is no guarantee that that equilibrium will be similarly healthy, biodiverse, etc. There's no guarantee it will even be an ecosystem at all; the Sahara Desert is basically an ecosystem that was so disrupted that it just straight-up collapsed. It is theoretically possible for it to end up healthier, but, well, look out in the real world at what ecosystem modification tends to produce and I think you'll be on the right track.
Replacing all the co-evolved mods with brand new ones is going to be intrinsically more disruptive than you may think. Moreover, the selection mechanism for the new mods is also likely to be highly disruptive; however they do it they're not going to be taking some mythical random sample, there's going to be some sort of systematic correlation between them all that will further tend to result in the communities experiencing rapid and non-trivial change. Plus, new mods will have no habits, no tools developed, no support structure from other existing mods, etc.
Continuing the biological metaphor, this is all coming at a time when Reddit is inflaming the entire community. Speaking for myself, I'm not particularly passionate about the API issue, I've just been following the community lead on it for the subreddit I'm a mod in, but I am definitely taking note of the loud notes of contempt coming out of Reddit in this drama. If this is the level of contempt they have for us all in vetted public statements, how much more contempt we must all be held in inside the organization when they can speak freely with each other. Consciously and otherwise, people are picking up on this, and things that a user might otherwise have pushed through will become reasons to leave for inflamed users.
The sum total of all of this is that while Reddit has the technical ability to remove and add mod status as they see fit, the community dynamics are more complicated than someone simply modeling the community as "the given set of people" may understand. They are living organisms of their own, if not ecosystems of their own, driven by a complex mishmash of relationships between the participants, and the level of disruption will be greater than you expect. Moreover, if you are not looking at the situation properly, the disruption will initially be smaller than you expect. The first day the invasive species is introduced into the ecosystem, nothing appears to be wrong. The first week after Reddit just boots all the mods and installs their own may seem like nothing much has gone wrong. The initial sound and fury will die down. But the sound and the fury isn't the damage; that's just the inflammation. The damage will only be seen in the weeks and months afterwards.
One of the most challenging things about managing communities is that for the most part, in my considered opinion, mass exodus is not the beginning of the trouble. It is the end. If you judge the quality of your community management simply by the membership numbers, you won't be getting any alarms unti...
This is what I don’t understand about the claims that any next generation of mods would be incapable of doing the job.
I think it will be exactly like the current status quo. You see subreddit and mod drama happening all the time.
So many people want to moderate a local subreddit for Seattle that we have at least three different ones. The mod teams for each all have strong (and different) political views. But the threat of their community splitting keeps the mods acting fairly reasonable when in the public eye, because each seems to desperately want to be the Seattle subreddit.
> So many people want to moderate a local subreddit for Seattle that we have at least three different ones. The mod teams for each all have strong (and different) political views. But the threat of their community splitting keeps the mods acting fairly reasonable when in the public eye, because each seems to desperately want to be the Seattle subreddit.
Yeah, this is something I’ve seen multiple times on Reddit. Mods on larger subs start putting into place capricious rules, and told the users that if they don’t like it, start their own subs. Then if someone does this and the sub actually start gaining traction, the original sub gets nervous and suddenly starts relenting because they don’t actually want users to go elsewhere, they just want to exert as much control as they can before they trigger an actual exodus.
It shows the importance of competition if we want users to be treated fairly. Unfortunately, there’s strong network effects working against it (both inside Reddit, and among the web in general), and mods have made things worse by working to shut down rivals.
Either way, though, the supply of mods greatly outstrips the demand.
> The mod teams for each all have strong (and different) political views.
Do you mean three segments between pretty left and extreme left? Because I am kind of skeptical there is a conservative mod on the Seattle sub. I saw how much of CHOP and the murders there were covered up.
The Seattle subreddit is pretty calm. That community expresses a lot of stereotypical 'I vote democrat' values.
The SeattleWA subreddit is pretty angry. That community expresses a lot of stereotypical 'I vote republican values'.
I prefer the Seattle reddit but don't much like either. The Seattle subreddit can have too much holier than thou sniping for points for my taste. Its the kind of place where if you expressed some doubt about this 'defund the police' thing you've heard about you might get some thoughtful responses and you might also get a breathless history lesson that accuses you of supporting chattel slavery. The SeattleWA subreddit is too full of violence for me - many posts are about violent crime, conversations about street people frequently have people fantasizing about using violence to resolve the issue. Its the kind of place where a post asking what post-covid seattle is like mostly has people expressing contempt for masking policies in the abstract and deriding people they have seen wearing a mask, a few folk addressing the question, and one person who has been around long enough to compare it to the recession in the 80's (which I thought was neat enough to mention).
I don't know of a third, but those two are different enough that I think even a casual inspection of both will give you an idea of which you might prefer.
everyone always says this yet getting a mod to relinquish their position is nearly impossible. Reddit mods desperately want to be mods and will do everything in their power to hold on to it. I know its a stereotype, but for many it is literally the only semblance of power/control they have over their life.
> There are certainly those, but not sure it is accurate to generalize to mods as a whole.
There are powermods who "moderate" hundreds of subreddits. This is not an exaggeration. Hundreds.
When questioned, they invariably say that they "just watch the incoming queue" or something, and the other mods "do all the work". While likely true in the literal sense (again, hundreds), such answers of course completely evade of the question.
>Reddit mods desperately want to be mods and will do everything in their power to hold on to it. I know its a stereotype, but for many it is literally the only semblance of power/control they have over their life.
I don't see why he wouldn't. Top of the line hardware is in the tens-of-thousands of dollars. He should have the OPEX-budget to buy enough cards to distort the market.
I'm not sure how you would properly prompted LLM change moderating standards based on community feedback? Sticky threads for popular topics? Have the understanding of things like local politics or a newly released game in 2023 to be able to separate out bad faith discussion from real? Reddit isn't twitter where the main thing the mods do is remove abusive replies. They're community crafters and maintainers.
My understanding is Reddit the company actually already uses openai's moderation api[1]. Not sure they expose that to anyone (even mods) outside the company. It's not an LLM I don't think though, it's just a set of classifiers to give a probability that something violates various categories of their TOS.
A few-shot prompt should be able to do it. Now, I will admit I have not tried; but you could have the prompt be some posts that are considered "on topic" (of the sub) and others that are "off topic", and let the LLM rate these posts. Limit the number of new posts to a small number to prevent probing and spamming.
And handling the 11th unique story on a single topic being posted and voted up by brigades that week? Considering people's user history when making moderation judgments? Having the context to understand new dog whistles? All things that are technically possible, I guess, but it requires a lot of complex prompting, long context windows, and effort placed into moderation tools that Reddit doesn't seem to have put significant effort into before.
No. It would be able to do some of the parts of moderation everyone would find easy, none of the stuff people would find hard and would cost a lot.[1] There are AI-powered companies and tools[2] that help with moderation but nothing that can automate everything that human mods do on any site with a reasonable user community.
I have a feeling they won't have a hard time finding deranged weirdos who want to mod and will remove anything that could in any way raise an eyebrow of advertisers/payment processors/etc
The worst mods for the community will be the best mods for reddit's bottom line. The power-tripping is payment in itself for those types.
>The power-tripping is payment in itself for those types.
As if the current mods are any different?
Honestly I don't mind this at all. The big subreddits have become so ossified in their power structures, that each community is its' own little fiefdom now. There is massive friction to being able to post anywhere. Reddit would be objectively better with a less heavy handed approach to moderation, and some kind of site-wide formal appeals process that neuters the ability of any individual mod from going on a power trip.
>There is massive friction to being able to post anywhere. Reddit would be objectively better with a less heavy handed approach to moderation
Whenever I see this sentiment I'm honestly stumped as to how anyone's experience can be so different from mine. What exactly is it that you're trying to post that's so difficult? because from what I see in nearly every sub, they'd be improved by more moderation, since nearly all of them get stuffed with off-topic and low-effort content, often actively breaking the community rules in the sidebar.
Different subs have different rules and different formats on what they expect. Casually posting as you would in one thread might get you banned in another.
Here is a good example. As a new user signed up for an account and posted in a sub got a lot of replies but didn't come back for a few months. Tried replying and was forbidden because of low karma points. Never came back..
The reason why you as a long term reddit user are stumped is because your experience is different.
It's false barriers that setup this tribal mentality where you think you have ownership in a community that someone else owns. Many are discovering this week that their ownership is fleeting
>What exactly is it that you're trying to post that's so difficult? because from what I see in nearly every sub, they'd be improved by more moderation, since nearly all of them get stuffed with off-topic and low-effort content, often actively breaking the community rules in the sidebar.
That's the problem, it can be anything. No, I'm not going to sit down and read every single bullet point of your specific subreddit rules so that what I'm saying perfectly jives with your little cult. I don't know how many times I've seen an interesting thread from a sub I've never visited, tried to add to the conversation, and got auto-moderated with zero recourse. No, I'm not going to "revise my post" to step in line with what you're expecting. I'm just never going to bother joining this community now.
So long as a post is on topic and not abusive or threatening, there is zero reason to remove it. But Reddit has become a place where mods curate their userbase into a nightmarish echo chamber, quash all dissent, and then use it as a bullhorn for their own ideologies.
> No, I'm not going to "revise my post" to step in line with what you're expecting. I'm just never going to bother joining this community now.
Good!
I only visit well curated subreddits. I don't want drive-by visitors, floods of memes, or similar content. My bread and butter are subreddits like r/DebateReligion and r/AskHistorians.
If the mods are not to my liking, there usually is an alternate sub on the same subject that is.
And this is exactly why Reddit has gone to hell. Mods with that attitude. "I was here first, so therefore I get to unilaterally set the Overton window for all discussion herein. If you don't like it, you're banned."
HN seems to be the last place on the internet where competing thoughts can exist. It's amazing to me that if moderation is so hard, why dang can do such a good job single-handedly with a user-base bigger than most subs.
> And this is exactly why Reddit has gone to hell. Mods with that attitude. "I was here first, so therefore I get to unilaterally set the Overton window for all discussion herein. If you don't like it, you're banned."
You can always create your own and be the first over there.
I agree though that there are some problems with the model, such as a long gone head mod suddenly poking back in and doing something radical, as well as a discoverability issue.
> HN seems to be the last place on the internet where competing thoughts can exist.
HN is good precisely because it's well moderated and ontopic. There are rules here as well, and content is filtered quite thoroughly. If you don't notice it it's just either because you happen to agree with the status quo by accident, or you got used to it over time.
> You can always create your own and be the first over there.
And be the only one over there.
If r/keyboards devolves, sure, someone can create r/seriouskeyboards, but that doesn't mean anyone will join them. First, there are already X orders of magnitude subscribed to r/keyboards; second, if a new user is looking for a group on keyboards, they're more likely to investigate r/keyboards than r/adjectivekeyboards.
"If you don't like it then make your own" ignores all of the realities involved. It's arrogant and dismissive.
"I absolutely refuse to even read the guidelines for participating in this community. 30 seconds of mental effort is too much for me to invest." "Gosh why does this community seem so upset with me, I did my best to be insightful and helpful"
>No, I'm not going to sit down and read [...] the rules so that what I'm saying perfectly jives with your little cult [...or] step in line with what you're expecting. I'm just never going to bother joining this community now.
(pardon the edit, but I don't think it's a misrepresentation of what you said)
So in other words, you didn't actually want to participate in the community and the automoderation worked as intended to ward off someone who wasn't interested in following the rules used to curate a specific community. Subreddits who have aggressive automod rules are almost without exception ones that put them in place due to the excessive rule-breaking posts from outsiders, including ones exactly like you. Some of the subs enforce specific templates to filter out the flood of low-effort repeats from people who can't be bothered.
People who actually want to participate in the community will read the rules and stay. Anyone who's offended by being asked to do that probably won't be a positive contribution to the community anyway.
Also:
>auto-moderated with zero recourse. No, I'm not going to "revise my post"
You literally listed the recourse you were offered! In the next sentence! And said you refused it.
> Same question, what specific "group think" are you so concerned is happening on reddit?
Try posting literally anything contrary to the party line on any noteworthy sub, and see how long it takes you to get banned. Particularly with a new account.
I haven't bothered posting anything on that site in years because it's a 50/50 crap shoot whether it will even be seen, or that the post I just spent 5 minutes of my life writing out will be instantly auto-modded for containing the wrong keyword.
Once again, I'm astonished at how different our experiences can be, since I'm a frequent commentor and I literally cannot remember the last time a comment of mine got deleted.
I notice you did not answer my question though. And I have to wonder what you're posting that you keep needing new accounts. As someone once said, 'If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you keep getting banned and having your comments deleted, maybe you're the problem'
> Same question, what specific "group think" are you so concerned is happening on reddit?
For more than a year, a handful of powermods were banning users which discussed the _possibility_ that SARS-CoV-2 was less dangerous than the media and politicians were claiming (now we have the data and it was less dangerous) or discussed the _possibility_ that the COVID vaccines were less effective or had worse side effects than the media and politicians were claiming (we now have the data and they were less effective and had worse side effects). These mods, who run the default subreddits, were banning users for posting in other subs which permitted such discussions -- that's right, if you posted in a sub that critically discussed what was going on, you'd get banned from default subs like r/pics and r/tifu.
I could list at least a hundred personal examples that had nothing to do with SARS-CoV-2 (usually opposing the American leftwing hive mind), but it's too easy for someone to just dismiss those as unsupported personal anecdotes. OTOH, it was well documented how Reddit shut down discussion re: SARS-CoV-2, as many other sites and services did.
> So long as a post is on topic and not abusive or threatening, there is zero reason to remove it. But Reddit has become a place where mods curate their userbase into a nightmarish echo chamber, quash all dissent, and then use it as a bullhorn for their own ideologies.
Ideology has nothing to do with it. The post could be flamebait, have a bad title such as "Give me recs", a clickbait title such as "Does anyone else hate Popular Thing", be easily satisfied by searching the subreddit, etc.
My local subreddit has become a proxy for /r/fuckcars and is also pushing a strong pro-new-airport narrative, among other things. There is a subreddit rule against “creating drama in the community” and any comment against the hive mind on these topics is interpreted by the mods as creating drama and removed, sometimes including a temporary ban. They more or less enforce the echo chamber. Disagreement is futile.
Meanwhile, reporting comments that clearly violate the subreddit rules for things like ad-hominem attacks and spam in turn get the reporter reported to Reddit admins for abusing the report button.
From my perspective a few of the elder mods stepped down and were replaced by activist mods that are moderating with strong, shameless ego to reinforce their preferred viewpoints and narrative.
That's unfortunate, and you've managed to present one of the few good counterexamples there. Unfortunately, "<city name>" isn't really a great topic for a singular community, since cities, by nature, host multitudes, and are inherently political entities. The best alternative is probably to create your own sub, or try to talk to one of the mods about it in private so as not to create drama.
Okay, you got me, those mods are on a power trip lol.
Although it depends on the size of the subreddit - you tend to get a lot of idiots who complain incessantly about plainly justified moderation, and we have to remember that these are literally unpaid volunteers, they're entitled to take actions that make their job easier.
People haven't liked this much when I've said it in the past, but I think there's more to this than just API pricing. I think there's a lot of general discontent about how reddit works that saw people more likely to support this strike. Some because it was the last straw, some to watch it burn.
While I do think reddit is blundering and taking their free labor and content for granted, I think the power mods and more generally the karma system create a lot of anger that has piggybacked on this.
I think you're right, but I think the new ones will be even worse and may actually cause the user exodus that will hurt them. It's these second order effects that Reddit doesn't seem to be taking into account because they're so confident this is mostly inside baseball to the average user.
Yes, as far as API pricing. No as far as the enshittification with "new" styling, NFTs, and all the other dumb shit. And the power mods.
Admin has been particularly horrible lately. Mods complaining is the tip of the iceberg. Today's Reddit is a far cry from what it used to be. Honestly I do have this sort of feeling that I could care less if it dies.
It’s not exactly new. It’s just that it’s being seen now.
You know the best day I ever saw on Reddit? The day after Trump was elected. The bots and mods and preppanned Clinton themed party made for seemingly ONE DAY of actually unique and genuine content if you could get past all the crying in some places.
2016 is when I learned just how much the narrative is controlled. When they had nothing to post, it was a completely different place.
I’m sure because I dared mention Trump as a date reference some people won’t believe me.
> "The worst mods for the community will be the best mods for reddit's bottom line."
Will it though? Twitter's moderation policies have all but collapsed and the net result is a near-total flight of high-profile high-dollar advertisers.
Like others have mentioned in the thread, the people who will most likely want to take over these subs are going to be some combination of bigots, cranks, and the severely deranged. That doesn't seem like it will do good things for user participation or advertiser attractiveness.
Who wants to advertise on /r/movies if the mod team is exclusively made up of chemtrails connoisseurs and the main topic of discussion is what movies are secret plots by the Jewish cabal?
What? They're not gonna put a bunch of edgy 4chan guys on the mod teams, that's not what advertisers like. They'll get the type of people who moderate every other mainstream site. Extremely left-leaning authoritarian types.
> Like others have mentioned in the thread, the people who will most likely want to take over these subs are going to be some combination of bigots, cranks, and the severely deranged. That doesn't seem like it will do good things for user participation or advertiser attractiveness.
So why would Reddit do it?
More likely, Reddit will pick moderators who are extremely advertiser friendly and who will squash "controversial" viewpoints -- as we've seen on other sites/ services, those "controversial" viewpoints are things like the precautionary principle, biological sex, free speech, free assembly, freedom of conscience, etc.
What supports the argument that it will go to "bigots, cranks and the severely deranged"?
>I have a feeling they won't have a hard time finding deranged weirdos who want to mod and will remove anything that could in any way raise an eyebrow of advertisers/payment processors/etc
8 years ago a bunch of Reddits went dark to protest the firing of Victoria Taylor. The AMA sub claimed that they wouldn't be able to continue without Victoria's help. Eventually the sub opened back up and things continued as they had before; the average user noticed no difference. If you told people today that Reddit AMA's hadn't been working for the past 8 years because the company fired an employee then, they'd probably laugh.
I still use Reddit and I get that beloved people get fired for any number of reasons, but AMAs have been noticeably worse since Victoria’s time running them.
I actually can’t think of more than a handful of examples of great AMAs the last few years. At one point it was a press stop for almost anyone famous doing a tour, and that doesn’t seem to be true anymore.
Actually this is a great example of wht they're going to get. AMA's used to be a GREAT use of Reddit when Victoria ran them. The questions were fresh and it was a very broad pool of people they interviewed. Since then they've either been 1) terrible 2) obviously pimping something or 3) a combination of both. They're not even worth reading and I stopped looking at them years ago.
I agree. I thought they'd be able to replace Victoria and it'd be no issue. But the magic of AMA, part of what drew me to reddit in the first place, was gone. I scarcely look at them now.
Same. I loved AMA back when it was new and was a mixture of famous people, interesting jobs, or just people with unusual stories. Victoria did a good job of balancing those and making the ones with famous people still feel fairly authentic.
After she was fired, AMA became almost entirely famous people shilling stuff like a generic forgettable late night interview show. I unsubscribed.
Yeah I'm thoroughly confused by OP because AMAs are a noticeable bungled opportunity on Reddit's part: They were attracting extremely high-profile people (Obama did one at one point), and now it's far less a preeminent part of the platform than it used to be.
The average user noticed no difference because AMAs just kinda faded into the background and became an unimportant part of the site.
AMA’s now are thinly veiled publicity events - like celebrities dialing into your local radio show to shill their latest project. There is rarely any feeling of actual engagement in modern AMA’s.
> If you told people today that Reddit AMA's hadn't been working for the past 8 years because the company fired an employee then, they'd probably laugh.
That's technically true, but that's because nobody today really thinks about Reddit AMAs, because there are fairly few of them and they're mostly lousy.
When they employed Victoria, AMAs were frequent and involved high-profile public figures engaging with the users in a way that, even if it was self-promotion, felt relatively genuine and was entertaining - This was because Victoria was essentially interviewing people with user-submitted questions, and she was good at it. The Reddit AMA was a cultural touchstone, like the late-night talk-show circuit.
Victoria herself was not somehow utterly irreplaceable, but as far as I can tell, they fired her and replaced her with nothing. With the result that Reddit lost a popular, interesting feature and a lot of cultural relevance.
I think it's very appropriate to compare that situation with the situation today, though perhaps not as you intended it; it won't burn down the site, Reddit will go on, but it will be a little worse and a little closer to that tipping point because of yet another bad management decision.
> With the result that Reddit lost a popular, interesting feature and a lot of cultural relevance.
Looking through /r/IAMA, and I can't say that I'm seeing that. If you look through the top voted AMA's of all time there, the vast majority are some years after Victoria's departure. Comparing those to the few on there from prior to her departure doesn't seem to show much of a difference, at least from what I can tell.
It does seem like the sub peaked a few years back, but again, that was still several years after her departure.
I don't know if this is a good metric because Reddit five years ago had 4x as many active users than 9 years ago.
It would probably be an interesting exercise to download the data for all the AMAs and adjust by MAU to see what the actual most popular threads were, but I'm not going to do that right now.
> I don't know if this is a good metric because Reddit five years ago had 4x as many active users than 9 years ago.
It does today, yet most of the top upvoted ones aren't from the last few years. Rather, most seem to be from 2 to 3 years after Victoria was fired. So they seemed to get more popular in the first few years after she was fired, and then less after that. I'm not sure that can simplistically be chalked up to an expanded user base.
The most upvoted AMA of all time is Obama's from a decade ago. However, that was a year before Victoria started working there (she only worked there two years from what I can find).
None of this is to denigrate her work, for what it's worth. Just that the doomsday scenarios that were given back then (IAMA mods were claiming they wouldn't be able to continue unless Reddit changed its decision) never came to pass.
> It does today, yet most of the top upvoted ones aren't from the last few years. Rather, most seem to be from 2 to 3 years after Victoria was fired. So they seemed to get more popular in the first few years after she was fired, and then less after that.
The subreddit was a default subreddit for a while, and no longer is. So for some years, every new Reddit user was automatically subscribed to it, and that stopped being the case.
> If you look through the top voted AMA's of all time there
That doesn't account for user growth though. You should normalize the figures by dividing by the total number of Reddit users, or at least IAmA subscribers.
No, /r/IamA was a default subreddit for many years, thus all new users would get subscribed to it (I think defaults have been gone for some years now, but subscriber inflation already happened)
> If you look through the top voted AMA's of all time there, the vast majority are some years after Victoria's departure.
It could also be explained by a growing userbase. More users in recent years means more upvotes in threads from the same period, compared to older ones. I checked a few big subreddits that are at least 10 years old and their all-time top posts are from up to five years ago.
Also, reddit changed how the upvotes are counted somewhere in 2016.
I think r/IAMA got a lot worse since Victoria left.
I used to visit it often back when she was around, but I don't think I even remembered it exists anymore, until you happened to mention it. It just lost relevance.
Huh, that explains why I haven’t looked at a Reddit AMA in the last ~5-10 years or so. I’m guess it was actually 8 years and I never realized what happened.
It's subjective I guess, but the AMA content quality on reddit did seem to fall off a cliff after she left. Not reddit destroying but definitely left a hole
I haven't seen a good AMA in a very long time. Tons of enshitification is eventually tolerated, especially by people who had no experience with an older version. That doesn't make it good.
They were actually right. This is exactly when Reddit AMA's went from something spectacular to spectacular garbage. They were producing bangers left and right, and what have they done since then?
That's funny because I use this example the opposite of you. AMA's completely changed after Victoria's departure and haven't been the same since. There were weekly high-profile AMAs that got large media coverage and it never went back to that.
Ultimately that protest went no where because there was no end game -- Victoria didn't want her job back. It was just done. End of era.
Jesus I completely forgot about r/IAMA and Im a daily reddit visitor.
I can't say that that subreddit was better in the Victoria Taylor era than today because I don't visit it anymore. I also can't say I stopped visiting it because of the same event.
But I know at some point I stopped caring about the high profile threads and the answers they gave.
I used to moderate a support subreddit, we eventually moved to Discord and encouraged everyone to move there as well. Behaviour such as only supports our move.
It’s obviously not really about the ability to use 3rd party clients. It’s because of the sudden change and the official app being flaming garbage.
This wouldn’t be an issue at all if the official reddit app was even half as good as the worst of the 3rd party clients and reddit actually providing parity in mod tools across their own clients. I have to go to new reddit to do multiple mod actions.
The /r/science mods are all coming back on Monday, a decision they made a few days ago, before any threats were made. They are worried that if they got replaced, it would be with people who would destroy the community they worked so hard to build.
I suspect a lot of communities, especially the smaller ones, feel the same way.
And thus, Reddit holds all the power. If the mods are so attached to their community, that Reddit can dictate whatever terms they want, then the mods have no leverage.
Federation works for Twitter, it doesn't work for Reddit. If my Mastodon instance federates with yours, I can see your posts, you can see mine, we're fully merged. If my lemmy instance federates with yours, we can browse each other's communities, but those communities themselves don't merge. The userbase merges but the communities do not, and the community is the base unit that gives Reddit value. Federated Reddits will never take off for this reason. You either have a bunch of fractured communities that are all worse because there is no network effect, or you have one instance (or one community) absorb all the traffic and become its own centralized fiefdom.
/r/science was already thrash too so biased it hurts, might as well be /r/politics2. Honestly nothing value would be lost with that sub.
Current front page:
>A new study has found that both Christian nationalism and biblical literalism are associated with a greater tendency to believe in conspiracy theories
>Being female, liberal, intellectually humble, and having weak party identification are all positively associated with writing more persuasive political arguments
>When house prices increase, homeowners are likely to strengthen their belief in meritocracy
> They’re gonna be left with bottom of the barrel mods.
sorry for pharaprasing.
do you have any evidence that there is a negative correlation between 'bottom of the barrel mods' and 'mods that are going to be outsted by the message about subs having be made private?'
Based on a quick google search, only .004% of Reddit users are mods. I find it difficult to believe that reddit will have a hard time finding competent mods within the remaining 99.996% of its userbase.
I really don't think that's the case. If you want to mod r/politics, you don't just raise your hand and then get mod powers. Moderators are a closed group.
This sounds distinctly different from one raising their proverbial hand to gain moderator powers on one of the most popular subreddits on the site. How many non-moderator users don't care about moderating a subreddit with 1 user but do care about moderating a subreddit with 1M users?
/r/programming was predicted to remain open during the strike, due to it being modded by Reddit admins. But they also went dark when the top post was collecting examples of chatgpt generated anti-protest comments. https://web.archive.org/web/20230612074029/https://old.reddi...
Ever since most of these social sites launched their advertising portals, moderation has basically become a practice in how to creatively subvert non-paying posters anyway.
These sites need to ensure they deliver on numbers represented to paid advertisers, and now it's pretty much the only way to make it to top rankings, so how much one is willing to pay determines what's on the front page more than anything else now.
The corporate mods are the ones that prevent harmful and deceptive things from staying at the top of the front page I bet, and they're not likely to be regular mod roles any time soon due to the power wielded.
These massive social media sites all get corrupted after a while and then can never manage to come back. This may well be that point for Reddit.
> They’re gonna be left with bottom of the barrel mods.
There are surprisingly few mods for how much engagement the subreddits have. There has to be mods that are just as good as the current batch, but haven't had a chance to shine.
This of course assumes the selection process is built to identify and promote mods that are as good, or better than the old mods.
Question for HN: If you were the Reddit admins, how would run the moderator selection process to get a great crew?
I pretty much stopped going to Reddit and it never really occurred to me that I would look for an alternative. I’ve reduced the amount of social media in my life (and I do count HN as social media) and I think I’m better off.
Lemmy's user base doubled since Monday and heading towards 200,000 plus right now. I definitely think there's a migration, even if it isn't all of Reddit.
I guess I'll try Lemmy again, but I'm not hopeful. When I used it last week any sub-community I was interested in either didn't exist or was completely dead.
the algorithm simply elevated other open communities to the front page
users that disabled the algorithm and only use niche subreddits never see the protest at all
I definitely think Reddit company’s view of the outcome is accurate, and that them choosing to not unilaterally open subreddits is favorable for them because it doesn’t matter too much, aside from useful information in old posts being locked away (for now)
Inevitable that this was going to happen. I have no issue with it.
Most mods have an issue because they want to mod from their phones. There are mods like me who use desktop exclusively and don't care about third party apps in the slightest.
More importantly, most users seem to want the subs reopened, and it isn't fair or just to punish the users because the mods can't mod the way they want to anymore.
The mods that actually polled their communities and acted on those results are the only ones I have respect for out of those protesting.
> More importantly, most users seem to want the subs reopened
Hard to prove one way or the other at the moment since the subs that vote to go private are now inaccessible, but almost all polls I've seen have been in favor of the blackout. r/all consistently has highly-upvoted protest messages from the restricted subreddits.
> it isn't fair or just to punish the users because the mods can't mod the way they want to anymore
That a protest against X results in inconvenience for the customers/users of X is pretty mild. If that crosses the line into unacceptable, you'd be against the vast majority of protest/boycott/strike action.
>Most mods have an issue because they want to mod from their phones. There are mods like me who use desktop exclusively and don't care about third party apps in the slightest.
Same here. Not a mod, but have always used Reddit from the desktop (with the new UI turned off), so zero interest in third-party apps. It's one thing to do messaging or email while out and about, but why would I want to intentionally use a text-intensive system like Reddit through a small screen without a keyboard to type on?
I wonder if the API change will end the practice of mods sharing automated block lists (Context for others: If you post in a wrongthink subreddit, many other subreddits will preemptively ban you regardless of your actual activity in them, if any). If so, and if there are fewer handfuls of powermods that control dozens of subreddits, I'm all for the change.
I know spez said he is going to let mods be voted out, that's already a huge improvement. One sub I'm in with about 300k people has the mods punish anyone who expresses an opinion they disagree with, and it's a majority opinion. They also let rampant bigotry go unchecked. I don't think they would last long.
I'm thrilled to watch reddit burn itself down, but of course the mods of big subs were one of the main reasons it was so terrible. If reddit could clone dang a few dozen times, then sure, kick the old mods out and maybe the site could get a handle on itself and be mildly worthwhile. But in reality, whatever jabronis they end up putting in place are not going to be any better than what they had before, and probably even worse. And so the site is still going to be awful, but now with a worse UI.
> the mods of big subs were one of the main reasons it was so terrible
I've heard this, and was just reading a thread on Reddit where many users told of their mistreatment and unjustified banning. But anecdotally I've never actually noticed mod misbehavior, and I've been a Reddit user for like 17 years. Could be the subs I read ... most of which aren't extremely huge, I guess. Still, I feel like I should have been banned from somewhere at some point if capricious, power-hungry mods really were as rampant as they're made out to be.
I don’t blame them. Reddit owns the subreddits, not redditors.
I have no idea why someone would put the time required into moderating a large sub for no money just for Reddit’s benefit in the first place. A Reddit model where the mods share in profits (kind of how YouTube creators do) would be interesting.
But if you’re going to sign up for that, you can’t expect Reddit to just let you tank their site. It was never yours.
I’d do the same thing if I were Reddit, though I guess I’d also not be in this situation if I were them either because I’d just price the API reasonably.
There are distinct questions here: whether Reddit has the right to forcibly reopen subreddits, whether it’s justified in doing so, and whether it’s a good idea at all. The first isn’t in dispute, but the other two are open for debate.
It could all go super well and everyone forgets about this shakeup, or it could engender further animosity and chase people (particularly trend-setting power users) to some other platform. It could also ruin some communities if the wrong new mods are chosen.
I’m not sure how likely this is but it is plausible.
Yeah. I get the whole fear of the same thing happening to Reddit that happened to Digg. But digg had Reddit nipping at its heels and it was still small, Reddit is huge there’s nowhere to chase them to.
The other alternative is for Reddit to just stand by and let the blackouts chase people away indefinitely. It is hard to imagine that is better. It will upset the people who have already decided to leave Reddit anyway, but for most of the people who just want to see funny GIFs, it will be better.
Thats why I argue that the boycott should be user driven and not mod driven. Let each user individually decide if they want to boycott rather than trying to force everyone into a boycott but shutting down entire subs.
Reddit doesn't seem to be ok with that either as there are reports they're undeleting content users delete in protest. The basic message is: "we control every aspect of content you put on here".
They have the right to reverse deletions, but it's a supremely bad look and if they're really doing it (this is the first I've heard of it) I hope they catch a huge amount of flack. There could be very good reasons for some of those deletions that might impact safety, job security, or personal relationships.
I manually deleted all my content on Wednesday afternoon. As of 8 am this morning all the comments were restored. So, yep, they're definitely undeleting content.
No I’m talking about content creators getting paid on YouTube. They get a cut of the advertising.
A Reddit Mod should be able to make money. They do a lot of work and growing a subreddit is a lot like growing a YouTube channel. Like a YouTube channel, it creates a lot of value for the site owner.
I think it’s the one that’s hardest to replace. There’s no viable competitor. People aren’t going anywhere else.
To large extent, the authors are only authors because the sub is on Reddit. They have the network effect that brings the other two. That’s very hard to replace. You could easily find another person to make up dumb rules and arbitrarily enforce them, which is what they’re doing and we’re discussing. They will succeed.
There's a quite simple non-malicious reason to become an unpaid mod - to make a community that you use better. I'm sure a substantial percent of mods joined for this reason. I've been a part of poorly moderated communities and thought: "wish I could just take down this non-compliant story or abusive comment".
Then there's a lot of negative reasons to join. For power, to gain a sphere of influence, possible to sell this as a product.
Threatening your unpaid volunteers who are responsible for keeping your site clear of the worst most vile freaks on the internet (something your site has repeatedly made international headlines for) is not long-term thinking.
I don't see a way that Huffman can follow through on his threat. According to Reddark [1] at the time of this writing there are still 4752 subs that are dark. I understand that powermods exist, but were Huffman to follow through on his threat he would have to come up with many hundreds of willing moderators, on a rather short timeframe.
Frankly, I don't see this happening, at least not without significant pain. Not to mention the ill will that is continuing to build, which will only compound the difficulty of getting new volunteers on board.
I tend to agree. Their thinking has to be that most mods (at least for the most important subreddits) either aren't willing to risk their positions or aren't that invested in the protest.
It’s actually not that hard since they have processes in place for this sort of thing. They have u/ModCodeOfConduct make a post in the affected community (I assume they reopen the sub and restrict it except for that post). https://www.reddit.com/r/oldbabies/comments/143cszv/new_mode...
I'm very very not great at prompt engineering and was able to get this working by thinking about it for 30 seconds, so I'm sure you could do way better than this[0].
I think /u/spez needs to take a look at /r/maliciouscompliance.
I cant see how actions like this wont lead to malicious modding to destroy the communities they helped foster.
That sounds like toxic work, any sane person would rather move somewhere else and do something productive, like building a new community, or find an entirely new hobby.
In my experience, whenever volunteer mod positions open, there is a near infinite supply of people that want those roles. For whatever reasons, people want it and those that have it typically seek to hold onto it.
It's borderline inexplicable to me. How could someone want this in the first place and how could they be willing to do it in a volunteer capacity?
Some section of population is attracted to power. And just about any type of power. Even if that was 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 it would still be substantial number in large enough communities. And if it were lets say 1 in 10k those same people would still search for all the places they could have power in.
Much like why some people contribute to open source projects, sometimes people find a thing useful but think it could be better, and spend some of their time to make it so, either by helping to organize things so the subreddit isn't frequently the same 6 posts, or organizing community recurring events, or a million other things to foster a community.
There's also plenty of people who like the authority, or a thousand other reasons, but that's one example.
> It's borderline inexplicable to me. How could someone want this in the first place and how could they be willing to do it in a volunteer capacity?
Being a gatekeeper for a popular subreddit is a form of meaningful influence. Meaningful influence can lead to money and other benefits. Reddit mods in the past have been exposed for using their influence to push certain content and block other kind.
Maybe for some major subs, but I've had multiple small-to-medium sized subs die because a mod retired/deleted their account and no one stepped up quickly to replace them. Reddit kills unmodded subs really fast.
Sure, the major frontpage subs will be fine, but there's plenty of more niche communities that are already dying/getting banned for being unmodded because no one wants to mod them. I literally opened a link to a sub today that was banned for being unmodded 2 hours ago, presumably because the last remaining mod deleted their account.
So many of the discussions here seem to be people mostly thinking of reddit as the big frontpage subs, which also seems to be what Reddit Corporate seems to think. What we're all likely about to see is how much value there is in the longer tail of smaller subs that are being run as a passion project by a few people in a niche community. It's easy to point to the small subs that are some power-trip for one mod or set of mods, but there's also plenty of small little subs that are niche and interesting and simply would never have enough interest or activity to support more than 2-3 mods.
> It's borderline inexplicable to me. How could someone want this in the first place and how could they be willing to do it in a volunteer capacity?
I wasn't sure what it was going to be like when I was invited. It's not fun telling people to behave, but I've found a lot of personal satisfaction in coding moderation tasks and working with the team. There are whole classes of work that I've automated away and it's easy to deploy improvements.
It is quite impressive to see the detailed intimate knowledge of the personality and inner landscape of reddit moderators shown by commenters in this thread.
Clearly the moderators have many psychological characteristics in common and are motivated by the exact same personality flaws and doubtless it is because of this that the commenters here are able to achieve such startling generality in their succinct evaluations!
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 892 ms ] threadClearly the internet has continued to grow more mainstream which brings a larger, alternate audience. I'm just speaking to the idea of why Digg failed and why Reddit won't (in this pass at least).
"Too big to fail" perhaps?
So I'm saying that the moderators consolidating their whole sub's voices into the voice of the moderator is analogous to how reddit is telling everyone how the site as a whole must be used.
Ah yes, this is in contrast to the benevolent employers who deeply care about each and every employee and would never lay them off just to buy another ivory backscratcher for the CEO.
On the other hand, if it's what they're going to do, then that's how it is. You can't really expect them to just leave a namespace like, say, /r/politics in the hands of someone who openly says they aren't going to use it. So of course they're going to remove mods who stick to a blackout, what else could they do? At the end of the day it's their site and everyone's free to leave if they don't like how it's run. This was always the problem with making a home on Reddit, some of us have been saying so all along.
(PS: Please understand that Discord is going to have a moment like this. Maybe in two years, maybe in five, but it'll happen. It is inevitable.)
Closing it IS using it, in a very public and visible way. They just don't like HOW it is used by the people who built it.
I assure you, there is a line around the block of people clamoring to become mods. There's a reason its nigh impossible to become a mod of a big sub, the people that are doing it really like doing it and dont want more people joining to dilute their share of the power.
The subreddit model seems to me to work as a combination of moderators setting and enforcing some rules, users submitting content (hopefully good) and users upvoting and commenting on content.
If the mods are wrong on all of this, then the users who voted to blackout either weren't contributing much or will back down and things will go back to business as usual. But it's also possible that replacing the mods will just lead to many of the users who voted to blackout taking further action. A subreddit without content or with protesting users posting spam isn't fixed by adding more mods.
If moderators were inconsequential Reddit wouldn't be trying to hire and fire them.
>I assure you, there is a line around the block of people clamoring to become mods.
The willingness of others to do the same work doesn't make what someone does inconsequential. Would you say an NBA player is inconsequential because you could find a million people who would like to play in the NBA? Obviously being a Redditor moderator and being an NBA player are two different things but by how you are valuing based on willingness to replace, an NBA player would be more inconsequential than a Reddit moderator.
> If there are mods here who are willing to work towards reopening this community, we are willing to work with you to process a Top Mod Removal request or reorder the mod team to achieve this goal if mods higher up the list are hindering reopening. We would handle this request and any retaliation attempts here in this modmail chain immediately.
> Our goal is to work with the existing mod team to find a path forward and make sure your subreddit is made available for the community which makes its home here. If you are not able or willing to reopen and maintain the community, please let us know.
I mean, here you are just describing the mods that are holding these subreddits hostage. It seems appropriate for reddit to return these to the community in the case where the obsessed power hungry mod's behavior goes against what the community wants.
(There would be more people voting if it was a brigade, so I’m pretty sure it’s not. But emotionally it bugs me.)
In the us it is the national labor relations board, after all! Not employement relations
In this case, mods can keep subreddits dark without any cost to themselves because they aren’t being paid by Reddit. It’d be like if library volunteers protested by closing the library and stopping any new volunteers from entering by installing a lock on the door. OFC the library is within their rights to break the lock to let other volunteers in.
In the near future when AGI eliminates scarcity (2025?) this will have to be litigated!
I will bet Reddit will be just fine.
How do you do that? Specifically, how would you limit the poll?
Also breaking out “nothing they’re doing is illegal!!” isn’t exactly the slam dunk many seem to think it is, IMO.
A DND club with an IPO?
DND has no control over people doing DND at a local hobby shop, but if Reddit gets directly involved in hiring and firing and other such management of free labor then it is setting up to be viewed as an employer. There are many differences between an unaffiliated 3rd party club and direct corporate involvement in personnel management where the more Reddit tries to manage its free labor, the more it runs the risk of running afoul of FLSA. Under labor law there is a difference in working for free for a non-profit, government, etc versus a for-profit entity where they are not the same when it comes to providing free labor and FLSA rights cannot be waived away.
I took this as mods would be considered employees in France. After a second read, it looks like they meant something different.
I may not be an expert in French law, yet an analogy that comes to mind would be envisioning workers of a grocery store who've decided to go on strike. But rather than merely expressing their refusal to work, they also opt to seal the store's doors, blocking customers from entering.
Of course, customers might find the current situation unfavorable due to the absence of employees (think of barren shelves, paralleling communities overpopulated with off-topic discussions). Management, too, would likely find the situation objectionable due to a lack of employees to ensure transactions are being made legally (equivalent to the absence of moderators who uphold site rules, a scenario potentially hazardous to Reddit). Even though management might be compelled to shut down the store under these circumstances, it's essential to remember that closure remains a management prerogative, not a decision for the striking workers.
Isn't that literally exactly what a strike is? No one crosses the picket line if a sufficient majority agreed to undertake the strike?
However, they can have volunteers fill the position: https://www.editions-tissot.fr/droit-travail/jurisprudence-s...
One of the things I have noticed is that the boycott is not from the users but from the mods of the community. Even if the community had a vote, if you want to boycott fine but they are forcing others to go along with with them.
So either they are not the majority or they feel that the community has such little willpower to continue the boycott that they must force them to take part.
I think the larger issue is now the blackout is still continuing the addicts are needing their fix.
And the vote or not does not adress my point about forcing users who don't want to participate to have to.
If the majority of the users wanted to boycott, then if they don't go to Reddit.com, simple as that.
They're always free to go start their own subreddits.
Reddit's practices until now said the opposite.
Every individual already had the option to post or not post, moderate or not moderate. The vote only impacted those who wanted to remain active.
Ask yourself, who told you that was true? The strikers? Or the guy with the vested interest in breaking the strike and desperate to find anyone -- literally anyone -- to cross the line?
I don't even use Reddit that often, I see that there is a vocal contingent that is telling me how Reddit is ruining Reddit.
If the company wants to kill their community, that is their prerogative. If it kills their company, that is what happens.
Subs didn't vote on if they wanted to keep posting/moderating. They essentially voted on if dissidents or the minority can keep posting/moderating
Everything you wrote is a gross misrepresentation of the stituation.
If I want to participate in a protest by not creating content, I don't need a vote or moderator permission to do so. I can just do it.
Going private means that people who want to post can't.
In terms of a strike, it wasn't some people walking out. It was a vote to walk out and then prevent everyone else who wants to work from doing so
If you can turn all of the subreddits into tens of thousands of problem children for Reddit that they can’t fix with automation, they will be unable to cope.
getting 500 million monthly users like Reddit is the hard part
If not at each forum I have to decide which variant of my name I pick and then remember. On reddit I could take that choice once for a huge number of forums. (as long as I was willing to share identity over different subreddits)
there's also kbin, and you can post/read from either with any Mastodon/Pleroma/Misskey account just with a worse UI. i'd be surprised at this point if the winner isn't just Activity Pub with some thin layer on top.
> different instances already stop federating each other, thus splitting the community early.
instances usually provide at least some reason when they defederate with each other. maybe users will learn to be cognizant of who they're associating with when they pick an instance. i've seen that with tech-literate friends joining Mastodon who pick a 4chan-like unfiltered/unhinged instance as their home without understanding that such an instance causes outsized complaints compared to the "average" instance and will have less access to outside communities as a result.
i'm sure there's an opportunity for better admin/mod tooling -- hopefully some of the defeds that have happened in Lemmy recently will reverse once things settle down -- but i think even with that it has to be a new way of thinking both for users and operators about what it means to be a member of an instance. it seems that when you hand someone a magic knob they can turn between "less toxicity/abuse" and "broader reach", most will turn it further toward that "less toxicity" edge than Twitter or Reddit do themselves -- even if the tooling for it's so crude. i get why that worries people, but honestly, the benefits of that in other federated systems i use so far have been incredibly worth it (and the cost of migrating to a different instance overblown).
I've been building a platform called Sociables which is intentionally not just a Reddit clone. We are trying to create an all-in-one place for people to create communities and not just posts.
Here's an example of a community:
https://sociables.com/community/Sports/board/trending
Just think, one of Reddit's features for years was the "trending subreddits" list. Someone made that, someone else approved it. It got put on the front page, it became a core part of the experience. There were meetings!! Meetings where this was discussed. It was an OKR, maybe even of multiple people, was there a whole team?
But you and I understand that the essence of community is that you get a small group of people who interact and re-interact and who get used to seeing each other and who have fun doing this thing, whether it's shitposting memes or discussing God or something else. You grow past a certain size and now you are shouting into the void, which is the same experience you have every day, just go to your local pub and shout your hilarious comments at the TV and you'll have more listeners than your comments on a large subreddit.
"Trending subreddits," people literally came into daily stand-up, "Hi Jessica, how is the 'suddenly destroy Reddit communities just when they start growing and thereby make Reddit suck more' feature going?" "Well I ran into some roadblocks as the sudden influx of new users makes the statistics very hard to pull, I'm thinking of changing to a cron job that reassembles the list every hour." "Jessica, we've talked about this, making Reddit suck more is of top priority to my manager and my director, I don't care how you do it, just GET IT DONE and we can get a big bonus at the end of quarter" "I won't let you down, boss! Reddit WILL suck more by the end of this quarter."
I don't think it's still a thing anymore as-is but I don't think it was deleted for the fact that it was the make Reddit suck feature? I think they're still basically doing the same thing but just basically temp-autojoining users into those subreddits, "Reddit wasn't sucking fast enough when people had to opt-in to flashmobbing a promising community, now we're just going to shove the people in the door and scream 'you're a flashmob get to sucking!' and hope that works." More meetings were had on this!
Here's a list of the core community features:
1. Customizable discussion boards. Community owners can setup threaded discussion boards for different topics related to their niche. Say a user creates a community for a niche like "Cars", under that community they could create different discussion boards for sub categories like "Car-mods", "Car-photos", "Car-sales", etc. This is different from Reddit where typically you only have a singular discussion board per community.
2. Voice chatrooms. Community owners can setup Discord style voice chat rooms where users can communicate via voice.
3. Real-time text chatrooms. Currently we only have a singular chatroom for the whole community however we are looking at adding the ability to create multiple rooms per community.
3. Synchronized YouTube/Vimeo player. Community owners can create a playlist of YouTube/Vimeo videos. Their community's player cycles through the playlist and synchronizes the playback so people within the community can watch the same video at the same time.
4. Baked in monetization. Community owners can offer tiered monthly membership subscriptions that allows the members to support the admins and mods. Owners can also link their PayPal to receive donations. Also adding paid post bumps and comment awards that users can purchase where the revenue is shared with the community owner.
There’s definitely possibilities there.
The important thing to note – even though you join a particular Lemmy "instance", it doesn't particularly matter which one, because you can subscribe to communities (subreddits) from any instance.
The instance I joined – vlemmy.net
An aggregator of communities to join – https://lemmyverse.net/communities
Sadly limiting instances like mastodon can do isn't available in lemmy or kbin afaik, so highly moderated instances like beehaw are resorting to complete disconnection (defederation) for now until moderation tooling improves.
One caveat about the current implementations is that a defederated instance doesn't seem to know it's been defederated from, so a stale copy of the remote content still exists and can be interacted with (users can post in the remote community that defederated and comment on stale posts, or even new posts in the remote community that are made by local users, however none of that will get synced to the remote communities / instance that defederated).
https://www.jayeless.net/2023/06/on-reddit-and-alternatives....
> There’s just no way I could feel comfortable in a community that supports the right-wing nationalist Putin’s war on Ukraine, or outright denies the harsh repression meted out against Muslims in China.
Which makes up 50% of the article, to "it's slightly different than reddit"?
Alternative implementations would probably help as well. Kbin seems to be one. Given the sudden recent interest, perhaps we'll see more before long.
What's interesting is that Reddit isn't really a single community - Each individual subreddit has it's own moderators, editorial voice, group of people, etc. They can each move independently.
For example, /r/startrek and the related startrek websites have all moved to https://startrek.website
This federates with Lemmy, kbin, etc - So if a user posts to startrek.website it shows up everyone else's servers, and people can reply from whatever federated site they use
as someone who stopped using Reddit a year ago, i get it. topical communities no longer exist in just one place. if you’re interested in 3d printing, say, you can join a reddit, join a chat group (in Discord, Telegram, Matrix — whatever app of choice), join a FB group or explore the topic on TikTok, find a 3d-printing themed Mastodon instance, …: and each one of these hosts adjacent communities. Reddit is no longer the only “community of communities” on the internet. if you zoom out, it’s been losing that moat for a while. users can get by decently well these days by choosing from 5+ apps they might already have installed when exploring a topical community. reddit killing their share of that app space doesn’t really help them.
Who the hell is going to want to mod in that context?
People with vendettas and power vacuum opportunists
People that want a different narrative on a subreddit
There are tons of people that have other causes and interests than API tooling or company drama
You know, this is all quite ignorable
I think that's part of Reddit's problem - They can replace the mods with random people if they want, but the likelihood that those people will put in the work and do a good job is not high.
based on what? is the control group the current mods because that's already a laughable set of people. there is no criteria before and there will be no criteria after.
1. Corporate marketing departments
2. Unpopular political/religious factions seeking to surreptitiously "move the needle"
3. Those who wanted to become mods before but didn't make the cut for completely valid reasons. Now they have an opportunity, only the quality will decrease as a result
In all seriousness this topic falls squarely into the square of "strong opinion, weakly held" as far as I'm concerned - nobody except people like us actually cares. That being said I've yet to hear a cogent argument for the contrary position... I make music for the audience, not for musicians.
Whereas drummers actually experience this panning configuration in real life, and when you're placing the mics in the mix, that's the set of ears you're trying to mimic, really because there isn't any _other_ set of ears to opine. And it's an important one because it provides the lion's share of the stereo image.
Live albums get a pass, of course. And yes, lefty drummers exist. If a lefty drummer wants their kit panned the way they hear it, that is of course fine.
Unfortunately the hysterical racists are so loud and pervasive that this is yet another issue we see broken down in a Manichean battle to cover for a total lack of new ideas.
Ideas are worth very little, it's the execution that matters.
Good shout on bringing it up though
That's not what the word "original" means.
Sequels, adaptations, remakes, reboots, etc. are not "entirely original" because they're using existing stories or characters.
Whether you like those works or not, it's flat out _false_ to call them "entirely original".
I don't watch television much except for a little bit of news and local weather, but it seems to me there's always about the same number of family-centered sitcoms and dramas set in the present, about one's parents generation (nostalgia aimed at 30 something starting a family) and grandparents or older ancestors (mythmaking, culture reproduction). Sitcoms are like the McRib of television; they generally don't age well but since they come and go as the cast ages out it's easy to get teary-eyed at how great they used to be.
Barbecue sauce.
The pauses are built into the script. It’s worse, it’s far worse. It highlights that the scripts are usually pretty bad.
Classic example of a completely unfunny basic show https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jKS3MGriZcs
If the timings could be adjusted I feel shows might actually be better off.
just not in the way the creators intended
How would that be different from the status quo?
The front page politics of even my local subreddit are completely divorced from the concerns of my neighbors and other millenials I know.
It was a blackmail operation. I am certain it was a means to an end.
Same as being a Reddit power mod. It’s about control.
In the status quo, Reddit, the mods, and the subreddit users have all coevolved with each other.
https://www.britannica.com/science/coevolution
They may not be entirely happy with each other, but they've developed with each other slowly over time, developed callouses, and generally worked out how to live with each other. Even if a mod here leaves and a mod there joins, the incremental changes to the community can be absorbed.
A complete replacement of the mod structure of a subreddit, especially a lot of subreddits at a time, will cause more chaos than you may initially expect. In ecosystem terms, imagine simply yanking out an entire species and trying to replace it by engineering fiat. Yes, eventually the ecosystem will resettle into some new equilibrium... but there is no guarantee that that equilibrium will be similarly healthy, biodiverse, etc. There's no guarantee it will even be an ecosystem at all; the Sahara Desert is basically an ecosystem that was so disrupted that it just straight-up collapsed. It is theoretically possible for it to end up healthier, but, well, look out in the real world at what ecosystem modification tends to produce and I think you'll be on the right track.
Replacing all the co-evolved mods with brand new ones is going to be intrinsically more disruptive than you may think. Moreover, the selection mechanism for the new mods is also likely to be highly disruptive; however they do it they're not going to be taking some mythical random sample, there's going to be some sort of systematic correlation between them all that will further tend to result in the communities experiencing rapid and non-trivial change. Plus, new mods will have no habits, no tools developed, no support structure from other existing mods, etc.
Continuing the biological metaphor, this is all coming at a time when Reddit is inflaming the entire community. Speaking for myself, I'm not particularly passionate about the API issue, I've just been following the community lead on it for the subreddit I'm a mod in, but I am definitely taking note of the loud notes of contempt coming out of Reddit in this drama. If this is the level of contempt they have for us all in vetted public statements, how much more contempt we must all be held in inside the organization when they can speak freely with each other. Consciously and otherwise, people are picking up on this, and things that a user might otherwise have pushed through will become reasons to leave for inflamed users.
The sum total of all of this is that while Reddit has the technical ability to remove and add mod status as they see fit, the community dynamics are more complicated than someone simply modeling the community as "the given set of people" may understand. They are living organisms of their own, if not ecosystems of their own, driven by a complex mishmash of relationships between the participants, and the level of disruption will be greater than you expect. Moreover, if you are not looking at the situation properly, the disruption will initially be smaller than you expect. The first day the invasive species is introduced into the ecosystem, nothing appears to be wrong. The first week after Reddit just boots all the mods and installs their own may seem like nothing much has gone wrong. The initial sound and fury will die down. But the sound and the fury isn't the damage; that's just the inflammation. The damage will only be seen in the weeks and months afterwards.
One of the most challenging things about managing communities is that for the most part, in my considered opinion, mass exodus is not the beginning of the trouble. It is the end. If you judge the quality of your community management simply by the membership numbers, you won't be getting any alarms unti...
I think it will be exactly like the current status quo. You see subreddit and mod drama happening all the time.
So many people want to moderate a local subreddit for Seattle that we have at least three different ones. The mod teams for each all have strong (and different) political views. But the threat of their community splitting keeps the mods acting fairly reasonable when in the public eye, because each seems to desperately want to be the Seattle subreddit.
Yeah, this is something I’ve seen multiple times on Reddit. Mods on larger subs start putting into place capricious rules, and told the users that if they don’t like it, start their own subs. Then if someone does this and the sub actually start gaining traction, the original sub gets nervous and suddenly starts relenting because they don’t actually want users to go elsewhere, they just want to exert as much control as they can before they trigger an actual exodus.
It shows the importance of competition if we want users to be treated fairly. Unfortunately, there’s strong network effects working against it (both inside Reddit, and among the web in general), and mods have made things worse by working to shut down rivals.
Either way, though, the supply of mods greatly outstrips the demand.
Do you mean three segments between pretty left and extreme left? Because I am kind of skeptical there is a conservative mod on the Seattle sub. I saw how much of CHOP and the murders there were covered up.
The SeattleWA subreddit is pretty angry. That community expresses a lot of stereotypical 'I vote republican values'.
I prefer the Seattle reddit but don't much like either. The Seattle subreddit can have too much holier than thou sniping for points for my taste. Its the kind of place where if you expressed some doubt about this 'defund the police' thing you've heard about you might get some thoughtful responses and you might also get a breathless history lesson that accuses you of supporting chattel slavery. The SeattleWA subreddit is too full of violence for me - many posts are about violent crime, conversations about street people frequently have people fantasizing about using violence to resolve the issue. Its the kind of place where a post asking what post-covid seattle is like mostly has people expressing contempt for masking policies in the abstract and deriding people they have seen wearing a mask, a few folk addressing the question, and one person who has been around long enough to compare it to the recession in the 80's (which I thought was neat enough to mention).
I don't know of a third, but those two are different enough that I think even a casual inspection of both will give you an idea of which you might prefer.
Curious in general, has Seattle as a greater entity mostly split into red & blue lines?
Last time I was there, I remember there were more independent (and interesting) anti-WTO/globalization and anarchist contingents.
There are certainly those, but not sure it is accurate to generalize to mods as a whole.
There are powermods who "moderate" hundreds of subreddits. This is not an exaggeration. Hundreds.
When questioned, they invariably say that they "just watch the incoming queue" or something, and the other mods "do all the work". While likely true in the literal sense (again, hundreds), such answers of course completely evade of the question.
Remember, "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People". <https://np.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_...>. This also applies to powermods, assuming they're not being paid on the side to push some ideology.
I'm not sure how you would properly prompted LLM change moderating standards based on community feedback? Sticky threads for popular topics? Have the understanding of things like local politics or a newly released game in 2023 to be able to separate out bad faith discussion from real? Reddit isn't twitter where the main thing the mods do is remove abusive replies. They're community crafters and maintainers.
[1] https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/moderation
Will the future be Star Trek or Dune as far as AI is concerned?
[1] Source: am responsible for trust and safety including the tech solution and the moderation team for a 1bil+ views site. [2] For example https://hivemoderation.com/ or https://www.openweb.com/
If they don't think this is a situation for an LLM, you can probably safely assume it's not.
The worst mods for the community will be the best mods for reddit's bottom line. The power-tripping is payment in itself for those types.
As if the current mods are any different?
Honestly I don't mind this at all. The big subreddits have become so ossified in their power structures, that each community is its' own little fiefdom now. There is massive friction to being able to post anywhere. Reddit would be objectively better with a less heavy handed approach to moderation, and some kind of site-wide formal appeals process that neuters the ability of any individual mod from going on a power trip.
Whenever I see this sentiment I'm honestly stumped as to how anyone's experience can be so different from mine. What exactly is it that you're trying to post that's so difficult? because from what I see in nearly every sub, they'd be improved by more moderation, since nearly all of them get stuffed with off-topic and low-effort content, often actively breaking the community rules in the sidebar.
Here is a good example. As a new user signed up for an account and posted in a sub got a lot of replies but didn't come back for a few months. Tried replying and was forbidden because of low karma points. Never came back..
The reason why you as a long term reddit user are stumped is because your experience is different.
This is a core feature that distinguishes Reddit as a "Community of communities". It's not a bug, it's a feature
That's the problem, it can be anything. No, I'm not going to sit down and read every single bullet point of your specific subreddit rules so that what I'm saying perfectly jives with your little cult. I don't know how many times I've seen an interesting thread from a sub I've never visited, tried to add to the conversation, and got auto-moderated with zero recourse. No, I'm not going to "revise my post" to step in line with what you're expecting. I'm just never going to bother joining this community now.
So long as a post is on topic and not abusive or threatening, there is zero reason to remove it. But Reddit has become a place where mods curate their userbase into a nightmarish echo chamber, quash all dissent, and then use it as a bullhorn for their own ideologies.
Good!
I only visit well curated subreddits. I don't want drive-by visitors, floods of memes, or similar content. My bread and butter are subreddits like r/DebateReligion and r/AskHistorians.
If the mods are not to my liking, there usually is an alternate sub on the same subject that is.
So thank you for staying away.
And this is exactly why Reddit has gone to hell. Mods with that attitude. "I was here first, so therefore I get to unilaterally set the Overton window for all discussion herein. If you don't like it, you're banned."
HN seems to be the last place on the internet where competing thoughts can exist. It's amazing to me that if moderation is so hard, why dang can do such a good job single-handedly with a user-base bigger than most subs.
You can always create your own and be the first over there.
I agree though that there are some problems with the model, such as a long gone head mod suddenly poking back in and doing something radical, as well as a discoverability issue.
> HN seems to be the last place on the internet where competing thoughts can exist.
HN is good precisely because it's well moderated and ontopic. There are rules here as well, and content is filtered quite thoroughly. If you don't notice it it's just either because you happen to agree with the status quo by accident, or you got used to it over time.
Exactly. Like with politics, "no moderation" is really just "moderation I agree with."
And be the only one over there.
If r/keyboards devolves, sure, someone can create r/seriouskeyboards, but that doesn't mean anyone will join them. First, there are already X orders of magnitude subscribed to r/keyboards; second, if a new user is looking for a group on keyboards, they're more likely to investigate r/keyboards than r/adjectivekeyboards.
"If you don't like it then make your own" ignores all of the realities involved. It's arrogant and dismissive.
(pardon the edit, but I don't think it's a misrepresentation of what you said)
So in other words, you didn't actually want to participate in the community and the automoderation worked as intended to ward off someone who wasn't interested in following the rules used to curate a specific community. Subreddits who have aggressive automod rules are almost without exception ones that put them in place due to the excessive rule-breaking posts from outsiders, including ones exactly like you. Some of the subs enforce specific templates to filter out the flood of low-effort repeats from people who can't be bothered.
People who actually want to participate in the community will read the rules and stay. Anyone who's offended by being asked to do that probably won't be a positive contribution to the community anyway.
Also:
>auto-moderated with zero recourse. No, I'm not going to "revise my post"
You literally listed the recourse you were offered! In the next sentence! And said you refused it.
Or ensure group think.
(Also, you are now banned from /r/pyongyang)
Try posting literally anything contrary to the party line on any noteworthy sub, and see how long it takes you to get banned. Particularly with a new account.
I haven't bothered posting anything on that site in years because it's a 50/50 crap shoot whether it will even be seen, or that the post I just spent 5 minutes of my life writing out will be instantly auto-modded for containing the wrong keyword.
I notice you did not answer my question though. And I have to wonder what you're posting that you keep needing new accounts. As someone once said, 'If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you keep getting banned and having your comments deleted, maybe you're the problem'
For more than a year, a handful of powermods were banning users which discussed the _possibility_ that SARS-CoV-2 was less dangerous than the media and politicians were claiming (now we have the data and it was less dangerous) or discussed the _possibility_ that the COVID vaccines were less effective or had worse side effects than the media and politicians were claiming (we now have the data and they were less effective and had worse side effects). These mods, who run the default subreddits, were banning users for posting in other subs which permitted such discussions -- that's right, if you posted in a sub that critically discussed what was going on, you'd get banned from default subs like r/pics and r/tifu.
I could list at least a hundred personal examples that had nothing to do with SARS-CoV-2 (usually opposing the American leftwing hive mind), but it's too easy for someone to just dismiss those as unsupported personal anecdotes. OTOH, it was well documented how Reddit shut down discussion re: SARS-CoV-2, as many other sites and services did.
Ideology has nothing to do with it. The post could be flamebait, have a bad title such as "Give me recs", a clickbait title such as "Does anyone else hate Popular Thing", be easily satisfied by searching the subreddit, etc.
Meanwhile, reporting comments that clearly violate the subreddit rules for things like ad-hominem attacks and spam in turn get the reporter reported to Reddit admins for abusing the report button.
From my perspective a few of the elder mods stepped down and were replaced by activist mods that are moderating with strong, shameless ego to reinforce their preferred viewpoints and narrative.
Although it depends on the size of the subreddit - you tend to get a lot of idiots who complain incessantly about plainly justified moderation, and we have to remember that these are literally unpaid volunteers, they're entitled to take actions that make their job easier.
People haven't liked this much when I've said it in the past, but I think there's more to this than just API pricing. I think there's a lot of general discontent about how reddit works that saw people more likely to support this strike. Some because it was the last straw, some to watch it burn.
While I do think reddit is blundering and taking their free labor and content for granted, I think the power mods and more generally the karma system create a lot of anger that has piggybacked on this.
I think you're right, but I think the new ones will be even worse and may actually cause the user exodus that will hurt them. It's these second order effects that Reddit doesn't seem to be taking into account because they're so confident this is mostly inside baseball to the average user.
Yes, as far as API pricing. No as far as the enshittification with "new" styling, NFTs, and all the other dumb shit. And the power mods.
I'm sure that the majority of this is
WOULD YOU LIKE TO READ THIS IN THE APP? ITS BETTER
true, but i think the API is one of the worst parts now. But there is
WOULD YOU LIKE TO READ THIS IN THE APP? ITS BETTER
some functionality I use for old.reddit.com, that I'm pretty sure will be next on the chopping block...
You know the best day I ever saw on Reddit? The day after Trump was elected. The bots and mods and preppanned Clinton themed party made for seemingly ONE DAY of actually unique and genuine content if you could get past all the crying in some places.
2016 is when I learned just how much the narrative is controlled. When they had nothing to post, it was a completely different place.
I’m sure because I dared mention Trump as a date reference some people won’t believe me.
Will it though? Twitter's moderation policies have all but collapsed and the net result is a near-total flight of high-profile high-dollar advertisers.
Like others have mentioned in the thread, the people who will most likely want to take over these subs are going to be some combination of bigots, cranks, and the severely deranged. That doesn't seem like it will do good things for user participation or advertiser attractiveness.
Who wants to advertise on /r/movies if the mod team is exclusively made up of chemtrails connoisseurs and the main topic of discussion is what movies are secret plots by the Jewish cabal?
So why would Reddit do it?
More likely, Reddit will pick moderators who are extremely advertiser friendly and who will squash "controversial" viewpoints -- as we've seen on other sites/ services, those "controversial" viewpoints are things like the precautionary principle, biological sex, free speech, free assembly, freedom of conscience, etc.
What supports the argument that it will go to "bigots, cranks and the severely deranged"?
Remember, "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People". <https://np.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_...>. This also applies to powermods, assuming they're not being paid on the side to push some ideology.
I was going more for "very hard, especially in bulk and on short notice" than irreplaceable there.
>wouldn’t it make more sense to protest by quitting?
Already did a while back...used to mod some big-ish subs.
Going private seems like a reasonable intermediate step though. A bit like workers holding a strike instead of straight to mass resignation
I actually can’t think of more than a handful of examples of great AMAs the last few years. At one point it was a press stop for almost anyone famous doing a tour, and that doesn’t seem to be true anymore.
My guess is she trained the guests less familiar with Reddit on how to have a successful AMA (e.g., “don’t be Woody Harrelson”).
And because they were so successful, publicists were probably more willing to allow them to happen.
Same. I loved AMA back when it was new and was a mixture of famous people, interesting jobs, or just people with unusual stories. Victoria did a good job of balancing those and making the ones with famous people still feel fairly authentic.
After she was fired, AMA became almost entirely famous people shilling stuff like a generic forgettable late night interview show. I unsubscribed.
I think the general consensus among Reddit is that AMA's were a lot higher quality back then.
The average user noticed no difference because AMAs just kinda faded into the background and became an unimportant part of the site.
That's technically true, but that's because nobody today really thinks about Reddit AMAs, because there are fairly few of them and they're mostly lousy.
When they employed Victoria, AMAs were frequent and involved high-profile public figures engaging with the users in a way that, even if it was self-promotion, felt relatively genuine and was entertaining - This was because Victoria was essentially interviewing people with user-submitted questions, and she was good at it. The Reddit AMA was a cultural touchstone, like the late-night talk-show circuit.
Victoria herself was not somehow utterly irreplaceable, but as far as I can tell, they fired her and replaced her with nothing. With the result that Reddit lost a popular, interesting feature and a lot of cultural relevance.
I think it's very appropriate to compare that situation with the situation today, though perhaps not as you intended it; it won't burn down the site, Reddit will go on, but it will be a little worse and a little closer to that tipping point because of yet another bad management decision.
Looking through /r/IAMA, and I can't say that I'm seeing that. If you look through the top voted AMA's of all time there, the vast majority are some years after Victoria's departure. Comparing those to the few on there from prior to her departure doesn't seem to show much of a difference, at least from what I can tell.
It does seem like the sub peaked a few years back, but again, that was still several years after her departure.
It would probably be an interesting exercise to download the data for all the AMAs and adjust by MAU to see what the actual most popular threads were, but I'm not going to do that right now.
It does today, yet most of the top upvoted ones aren't from the last few years. Rather, most seem to be from 2 to 3 years after Victoria was fired. So they seemed to get more popular in the first few years after she was fired, and then less after that. I'm not sure that can simplistically be chalked up to an expanded user base.
The most upvoted AMA of all time is Obama's from a decade ago. However, that was a year before Victoria started working there (she only worked there two years from what I can find).
None of this is to denigrate her work, for what it's worth. Just that the doomsday scenarios that were given back then (IAMA mods were claiming they wouldn't be able to continue unless Reddit changed its decision) never came to pass.
The subreddit was a default subreddit for a while, and no longer is. So for some years, every new Reddit user was automatically subscribed to it, and that stopped being the case.
Everything you're saying actually corroborates OP's claim.
That doesn't account for user growth though. You should normalize the figures by dividing by the total number of Reddit users, or at least IAmA subscribers.
It could also be explained by a growing userbase. More users in recent years means more upvotes in threads from the same period, compared to older ones. I checked a few big subreddits that are at least 10 years old and their all-time top posts are from up to five years ago.
Also, reddit changed how the upvotes are counted somewhere in 2016.
I used to visit it often back when she was around, but I don't think I even remembered it exists anymore, until you happened to mention it. It just lost relevance.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/top/?t=all
I had to scroll for pages and pages to find one that was recent. The heyday appears to have been 5 to 9 years ago.
It looks like this sub got established as the place to go and then it slowly lost momentum over time.
Ultimately that protest went no where because there was no end game -- Victoria didn't want her job back. It was just done. End of era.
I can't say that that subreddit was better in the Victoria Taylor era than today because I don't visit it anymore. I also can't say I stopped visiting it because of the same event.
But I know at some point I stopped caring about the high profile threads and the answers they gave.
Why do I need so many members to show up when search for servers? That means I need to have a community somewhere else.
This wouldn’t be an issue at all if the official reddit app was even half as good as the worst of the 3rd party clients and reddit actually providing parity in mod tools across their own clients. I have to go to new reddit to do multiple mod actions.
I suspect a lot of communities, especially the smaller ones, feel the same way.
Mods that feel that strongly about protecting their community would do so much better in a federated context.
It's psychologically unhealthy, any therapist would tell you that.
Current front page:
>A new study has found that both Christian nationalism and biblical literalism are associated with a greater tendency to believe in conspiracy theories
>Being female, liberal, intellectually humble, and having weak party identification are all positively associated with writing more persuasive political arguments
>When house prices increase, homeowners are likely to strengthen their belief in meritocracy
I really hope a mass migration to lemmy instances really sticks.
They are not asking a lot, just don't shut down the site in a hissy fit
I made no such statement.
sorry for pharaprasing.
do you have any evidence that there is a negative correlation between 'bottom of the barrel mods' and 'mods that are going to be outsted by the message about subs having be made private?'
That was what you said before.
Competent - many I'm sure. Damn near anyone that has supervised people in just about any context is probably overqualified.
Competent and willing to put in hours of unpaid work dealing with crazy people and drama and bickering and spam deletion...less so.
Who would want to instantly have status over millions of people? Hmm, that's a hard one...
These sites need to ensure they deliver on numbers represented to paid advertisers, and now it's pretty much the only way to make it to top rankings, so how much one is willing to pay determines what's on the front page more than anything else now.
The corporate mods are the ones that prevent harmful and deceptive things from staying at the top of the front page I bet, and they're not likely to be regular mod roles any time soon due to the power wielded.
These massive social media sites all get corrupted after a while and then can never manage to come back. This may well be that point for Reddit.
There are surprisingly few mods for how much engagement the subreddits have. There has to be mods that are just as good as the current batch, but haven't had a chance to shine.
This of course assumes the selection process is built to identify and promote mods that are as good, or better than the old mods.
Question for HN: If you were the Reddit admins, how would run the moderator selection process to get a great crew?
The same type of people who want to be on the boards of HOA's. eg: the ones you least want doing it.
There isn't one. At least not similar or consensus.
Weird to burn bridges without a plan.
https://sqwok.im/
It's just casual entertainment, not life/career.
That said you are right on the alternatives being in short supply. Which is a problem in itself and another reason to bail.
users that disabled the algorithm and only use niche subreddits never see the protest at all
I definitely think Reddit company’s view of the outcome is accurate, and that them choosing to not unilaterally open subreddits is favorable for them because it doesn’t matter too much, aside from useful information in old posts being locked away (for now)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36350938
Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private - 1573 points, 12 hours ago, 915 comments
Most mods have an issue because they want to mod from their phones. There are mods like me who use desktop exclusively and don't care about third party apps in the slightest.
More importantly, most users seem to want the subs reopened, and it isn't fair or just to punish the users because the mods can't mod the way they want to anymore.
The mods that actually polled their communities and acted on those results are the only ones I have respect for out of those protesting.
Hard to prove one way or the other at the moment since the subs that vote to go private are now inaccessible, but almost all polls I've seen have been in favor of the blackout. r/all consistently has highly-upvoted protest messages from the restricted subreddits.
> it isn't fair or just to punish the users because the mods can't mod the way they want to anymore
That a protest against X results in inconvenience for the customers/users of X is pretty mild. If that crosses the line into unacceptable, you'd be against the vast majority of protest/boycott/strike action.
Same here. Not a mod, but have always used Reddit from the desktop (with the new UI turned off), so zero interest in third-party apps. It's one thing to do messaging or email while out and about, but why would I want to intentionally use a text-intensive system like Reddit through a small screen without a keyboard to type on?
I wonder if the API change will end the practice of mods sharing automated block lists (Context for others: If you post in a wrongthink subreddit, many other subreddits will preemptively ban you regardless of your actual activity in them, if any). If so, and if there are fewer handfuls of powermods that control dozens of subreddits, I'm all for the change.
I've heard this, and was just reading a thread on Reddit where many users told of their mistreatment and unjustified banning. But anecdotally I've never actually noticed mod misbehavior, and I've been a Reddit user for like 17 years. Could be the subs I read ... most of which aren't extremely huge, I guess. Still, I feel like I should have been banned from somewhere at some point if capricious, power-hungry mods really were as rampant as they're made out to be.
I have no idea why someone would put the time required into moderating a large sub for no money just for Reddit’s benefit in the first place. A Reddit model where the mods share in profits (kind of how YouTube creators do) would be interesting.
But if you’re going to sign up for that, you can’t expect Reddit to just let you tank their site. It was never yours.
I’d do the same thing if I were Reddit, though I guess I’d also not be in this situation if I were them either because I’d just price the API reasonably.
It could all go super well and everyone forgets about this shakeup, or it could engender further animosity and chase people (particularly trend-setting power users) to some other platform. It could also ruin some communities if the wrong new mods are chosen.
I’m not sure how likely this is but it is plausible.
Reddit owns Reddit, no? They have the right to do whatever they want with their website.
The other alternative is for Reddit to just stand by and let the blackouts chase people away indefinitely. It is hard to imagine that is better. It will upset the people who have already decided to leave Reddit anyway, but for most of the people who just want to see funny GIFs, it will be better.
feeling of power and purpose?
Remember, "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People". <https://np.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_...>. This also applies to powermods, assuming they're not being paid on the side to push some ideology.
As I said,
>assuming they're not being paid on the side to push some ideology
Reddit can do whatever they want with their site but they can't force users to do anything.
In what way would it be interesting?
There would, of course, be some downsides too.
A Reddit Mod should be able to make money. They do a lot of work and growing a subreddit is a lot like growing a YouTube channel. Like a YouTube channel, it creates a lot of value for the site owner.
Community is a bit like a butterfly. Try to grip it too tightly and you no longer have a butterfly just mush
I view a subreddit as a composite of three parts: The authors, the curators, and the host.
Reddit, Inc. owns only one of those three, and it's arguably the one that's most easily replaced.
To large extent, the authors are only authors because the sub is on Reddit. They have the network effect that brings the other two. That’s very hard to replace. You could easily find another person to make up dumb rules and arbitrarily enforce them, which is what they’re doing and we’re discussing. They will succeed.
Then there's a lot of negative reasons to join. For power, to gain a sphere of influence, possible to sell this as a product.
You have to remember that Steve (spez), the CEO, is precisely one of those, and was the head moderator of r/jailbait before that finally shut down.
Frankly, I don't see this happening, at least not without significant pain. Not to mention the ill will that is continuing to build, which will only compound the difficulty of getting new volunteers on board.
[1] https://reddark.untone.uk
[0]: https://chat.openai.com/share/69a9d595-ad26-450e-9810-da39e9...
It's borderline inexplicable to me. How could someone want this in the first place and how could they be willing to do it in a volunteer capacity?
There's also plenty of people who like the authority, or a thousand other reasons, but that's one example.
Being a gatekeeper for a popular subreddit is a form of meaningful influence. Meaningful influence can lead to money and other benefits. Reddit mods in the past have been exposed for using their influence to push certain content and block other kind.
Sure, the major frontpage subs will be fine, but there's plenty of more niche communities that are already dying/getting banned for being unmodded because no one wants to mod them. I literally opened a link to a sub today that was banned for being unmodded 2 hours ago, presumably because the last remaining mod deleted their account.
So many of the discussions here seem to be people mostly thinking of reddit as the big frontpage subs, which also seems to be what Reddit Corporate seems to think. What we're all likely about to see is how much value there is in the longer tail of smaller subs that are being run as a passion project by a few people in a niche community. It's easy to point to the small subs that are some power-trip for one mod or set of mods, but there's also plenty of small little subs that are niche and interesting and simply would never have enough interest or activity to support more than 2-3 mods.
Remember, "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People". <https://np.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_...>. This also applies to powermods, assuming they're not being paid on the side to push some ideology.
I wasn't sure what it was going to be like when I was invited. It's not fun telling people to behave, but I've found a lot of personal satisfaction in coding moderation tasks and working with the team. There are whole classes of work that I've automated away and it's easy to deploy improvements.
Clearly the moderators have many psychological characteristics in common and are motivated by the exact same personality flaws and doubtless it is because of this that the commenters here are able to achieve such startling generality in their succinct evaluations!