Tell HN: Reddit Removes Multiple Moderator Teams of Large Subreddits
Reddit has removed the entire moderator teams for several communities, includes:
* /r/InterestingAsFuck (11.5 million subs)
* /r/MildlyInteresting (22.3 million subs)
* /r/TIHI (1.7 million subs)
Plus many others.
These were subreddits that held a community vote with tens of thousands of votes to decide what type of content to allow.
NSFW content won, with the implication that NSFW subreddits cannot be monetized.
These subreddits are now restricted and unmoderated, available for request to new moderators through /r/redditrequest.
96 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/aaronp613/status/1671298446974656514
To me it doesn't seem like they actually violated any Reddit policy or code of conduct, particularly because the NSFW content was properly labeled.
https://www.redditinc.com/policies/moderator-code-of-conduct
https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy
The same admin account was also caught quietly flipping the NSFW subs back to SFW status. So this is clearly just about getting back that monetization.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14ebl7k/umodcodeo...
and back that normal experience of millions of readers of those subreddits.
edit: I mean let's be real, you've been panning for reddit for two weeks. You're concern trolling asking for links.
> you believe Reddit is in the right here
I didn't say anything like that. Reddit is private for profit company, owns platform and content and acts to maximize long term profit.
> they lost PR battle
That's reddit, not any devs or mods.
But no, there was no formal poll that took into account response bias and made use of proper stratification and randomization to ensure a fair survey. Some bigger subs did ask "what do we do" and some subs went with the idea of the most upvoted comment, a common tactic in reddit.
This was r/pics's "poll": https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/14b2a6q/poll_decide_o...
It is not scientific, so you can easily dismiss it. But I think that is the wrong angle to look at something that is ultimately trying to say "yes, a lot of people who decided to vote/comment do want this to happen". You can use the casual browser as points for or against them, because they are simply in for the ride if they don't speak up.
>Reddit is private for profit company, owns platform and content and acts to maximize long term profit.
yes, and I as a (former) user do not care about coporate's goals. I wanted an easy, feature filled UX and have asked for features for almost a decade. Almost none of them came about, so I used extensions and alternative apps that provided them
Reddit's reaction was to
- take away features provided by extensions to fit into a subscription model. No, I do not think it is worth $5/month to be able to see new comments highlighted. I simply found a new extension when RES removed the features
- only add in a few features when literally all hell broke loose (remember why we can filter subreddits on r/all now? What does that teach me? that I need to break the rules and inconvinence users if I want change? Good lesson, actually.)
- ignore 90% of other asked for features. Some of which could have helped right now if they did so (Oh, I wonder why NSFW can't diffentiate between violence, gore, sexual content, and foul language?).
- And now they repeat this tactic by removing more alternatives while refusing to implement user centric features.
No one asked for a video player and it sucks anyway. No one wanted the ignore feature to be removed while the block feature to actively disrupt conversation on the whim of an arbiturary individual. No one at all wanted NFTs for a profile pic (old reddit doesn't even have proile pics).
It's rent-seeking, and I do not respect the tactic. Even if I never used 3p apps I'd be against reddit because historically they have never attempted to act in my interest. I am not respected so why should I care about how they make money?
thank you for constructively providing link, though pics is not in the list of subs in the post
> I as a (former) user do not care about coporate's goals. I wanted an easy
future will tell if you are part of large group of users or outlier.
pics isn't NSFW. just maliciously compliant. I do wonder how/if Reddit will do anything with it, though.
>future will tell if you are part of large group of users or outlier.
I've been an outlier nearly my entire life. I left reddit 3 years ago now. I don't expect my graceful leave to do anything in the grand scheme of things.
I am simply looking out for my own interests and communicating my thought process, sample of 1. Maybe a few others agree. most very likely don't care and would dismiss me with "go touch grass".
obviously taking what they built and saying "I built this" wouldn't show anything but spez's pettiness
And current power mods who declared they own subreddits also not all mods (current and past), but unknown share of them.
You're the minority and you're expecting to run the show. That's not how it works.
Edit: long live r/animetitties
...no, it's clearly about someone at reddit raging out of control and grasping at straws to justify banhammering mods in a desperate attempt to save a ship that has split in two, is on fire, leaking radioactive waste, while sharks circle.
I've seen this happen on mailing lists and discussion boards where an admin/mod throws a major wobbly and just starts banning people like crazy for the slightest infractions to scare everyone else into "behaving." That's about when quietly someone who is respected pools together every email they can get their hands on and invites everyone to mailing list run elsewhere.
It often seems that those who would eagerly seize such opportunities might precisely be the individuals ill-suited for the task.
https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/65x4a7/testing_a...
Maybe it'll also mean turning off user generated content too, and only have admin made posts, the same as Digg did. They could hire the power-users to keep making the relevant posts.
People you don't have on contract are a liability
how so? there are more than enough moderators left who have no issue with reddit's current behaviour and will continue modding for free.
Reddit is a burning ship and no one can put out the fire now no matter what they do when they piss off their user base like this.
I plan to leave the platform in some spectacular way in a short time.
I guess they could audit submission history, but there's a chance of that blowing up as users decide the mods are shills. I've rarely seen Reddit as mad as when they decide someone is a shill, and the vitriol is likely to make the new mods' lives hard. Especially so if they're new mods, and aren't as used to people hurling insults and maybe death threats at them (I don't know how likely death threats are, but it seems like everyone with any online visibility gets them these days).
I'm sure they could eventually find mods, but I think there will be chaos in that process. I guess the question is whether they're willing to extend the current chaos to keep free moderation, or if they'd rather pony up some money to end it now.
Edit: added "free" in the last paragraph, last sentence between "keep" and "moderation"
Shadowban all users. Respond to their comments and posts with AI generated responses only visible to the poster. Redditors famously don't want others to know their handle so they won't share it around. You could only tell from a signed out device reading something you commented in.
Flood the site with generated posts and 'engagement' that is all ad friendly. Turn the whole place into Weenie Hut Jr.
Do this pre IPO then bail forever.
There's a lot of reposted content too. I tried to farm r/poetry to feed my LLM, but the top stuff are the same reposted poems and edgy anti-poetry. Reddit could just repost the same thing again and again.
> Do this pre IPO then bail forever.
I wonder if that would constitute what the SEC calls "Internet fraud" at that point.
That's the whole point of reddit; for various reasons they convinced people to give them fuckloads of free labor.
Reddit brilliantly acted like "king" giving fiefdoms out to mods and pretending like it was "theirs." "Here, dear mod! Here is some internet land to rule mostly as you see fit."
Well...the king demanded a huge tithe, a good portion of the lords told the king his mother was a hamster and his father smelled like elderberries....and the king is now laying down the law and making it very clear who everything actually belongs to.
The problem is: without any lords, the king has no power, because he can't possibly administer all the fiefdoms himself...and right now, a lot of the peasants really fucking hate the king, and like the lords.
Right now spez is trying to scare mods straight and reward those who toe the line by redistributing fiefdoms to them.
Once this tsunami dies down, we'll put it back the way it was before. In the meantime, when there's significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...), we can take the penalty off. The trouble is that it's not exactly easy to tell significant new information apart from significant new drama. Plus I was offline for part of the day yesterday.
As you can see from the above HN Search link, it's not like HN has been lacking for Reddit discussion—the problem is all the other way.
Why change the weighting given stories on a given topic without notice?
And how do you reconcile this change with HN's long-standing policy that "We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or YC startups are the story", which is "literally the first rule of HN moderation"?
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320816>
Reiterated within the past week: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36366909>
A few days ago.
> Why change the weighting given stories on a given topic without notice?
We don't give notice about that kind of thing.
> And how do you reconcile this change with HN's long-standing policy
It follows it strictly. HN has had over 500 threads about Reddit, containing over 25,000 comments, in the 3 weeks since this kerfuffle went kablooey. (And that's just the threads with "reddit" in the title - there have been plenty more.) For any other topic that repetitive and drama-filled, we would have penalized it much more and much earlier.
The rule is that we moderate less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is the story. Note the word "less". We still moderate, we just do it less—and we've done it way less on this Reddit tsunami than we otherwise would have. In fact we probably went too far in the other direction.
I mean just look at those search results: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1687485600&dateRange=custom&.... That is nuts, way over the top, and not at all standard practice for HN. The idea (if anyone is entertaining it) that we've somehow suppressed this story is pretty silly when it's one of the most-discussed (and most repetitively, and indignantly) topics of all time.
If there's significant new information, you'd be welcome to let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can take a look. I didn't see significant new information at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36434885, and I certainly didn't see a substantively different discussion in the HN comments - merely the same rehash.
My principle concern here is with transparency and fairness. I'll argue that HN is reasonably good about the latter. For the former, though, there's some pretty serious spelunking that's required to determine practices and policies. The task isn't impossible, you've written numerous times on why shorter and more flexible guidelines are preferable to long and strict ones. And I often (though sometimes grudgingly) come to understand, if not necessarily accept, your position.
I'm well aware of the recent flood of Reddit submissions, and I've made the point myself a couple of times in the past weeks: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36435319> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36321773>, and specifically noted that "Reddit" in titles is trending well above the historical high-water mark set in 2012 (46 mentions for the year), a point I'd made to suggest that HN was not over-penalising the topic.
I'd like to distinguish submissions and even threads (which Algolia search turns up readily) with front-page stories which it doesn't, and which really can't easily be determined without explicitly crawling the front page archive. That's something I'd begun undertaking in late May of this year, (initially to answer a different question: what state(s) get the most love on HN), and even now is answering a range of questions and curiosities about HN.[1]
The front page has both a significance and scarcity which submissions and threads do not: 10,950 slots in a regular year, an additional 30 on leap years. The archive and patterns it reveals over front-page HN activity, itself a mix of influences from submitters to community activity (votes, comments, flags), to HN moderation (automated and explicit), and of course, the larger world, SV and beyond, is catnip for me, and I suspect interesting to others. It's the confluence of influencing factors that I find most interesting --- submitters alone have suprisingly little influence in general on final disposition, something that's hard to recognise from the outside.
I've least concern for my own recent submission's fate (it rapidly ranked far higher than I'd expected, then fell quickly in StoryPos (story position) --- you've explained in email that was due to the flamewar detector). I would suggest that that introduced a new point that a Reddit admin pledge had previously been made to NOT reassign the subreddit. That said, yes, judging significance for a slew of similar stories, particularly as Reddit lays claim to four-, three-, and two-digit membership subreddits, isn't viable for HN.
The fact that there are topics HN has difficulty in discussing reasonably is somewhat painfully evident to many. I would suggest that this could be seen as a challenge to better enable those discussions, many of which are highly significant. And yes, many have tried and failed here.
There was a suggestion a few months ago for HN to feature a dedicated "customer-service-of-last-resort" section. I'd like to see that developed further. Even if the threads are repetitive, they afford a capability the present landscape is sorely lacking. And address a problem which YC in its role as a tech incubator has helped create, which is to say, internalises a cost to YC that's presently been socialised.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34941474>
________________________________
Notes:
1. Another way to look at this is what the minimum mean votes of a front-page HN article is (looking at StoryPos 30), which for 2023 has b...
I'm afraid I must disappoint you. We're never going to do that, because (1) it would go completely against what we're trying to optimize for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), and (2) I don't want to run a customer support forum for products I have no control over. That would be a circle of hell, and not an outer one.
Re "highly significant" discussions - this is an internet message board. The genre is transient and trivial, and as we know from McLuhan, that factor dominates any of the content channeling through it. That's why when people try to do "highly significant" things in internet threads, it always comes across as overblown and overwrought.
* Tumblr was living from NSFW content and when they banned NSFW content Tumblr basically ceased to exist.
* Reddit is living from free moderation and when they banned 3rd party tools for moderation, because Reddit ones sucks, they might be going in same direction as Tumblr.
"Reblogs" are a bigger feature on Tumblr than twitter generally and the reply / threading structure is pretty unique, which has a tendency to create a lot of blogs that are essentially 100% reblogging other content.
The majority of subreddits on Reddit are moderated by moderators who only mod one or maybe a related subreddit. Quite a bit of work goes into it, especially on the more active ones.
Is there anything specifically you don’t like about reddits current moderator system?
What if I have? What if I haven't? To answer your question, yes I have, including medium sized ones.
>The majority of subreddits on Reddit are moderated by moderators who only mod one or maybe a related subreddit.
Possibly, but all of those combined probably have less users than a single median sized subreddit. Their impact, userbase, views, etc. are miniscule.
>Quite a bit of work goes into it, especially on the more active ones.
It's a tough job hammering out all dissent, shaping the narrative, and dictatorially destroying communities!
>Is there anything specifically you don’t like about reddits current moderator system?
Almost everything? How about automatically being banned from subs for posting or following wrongthink subs? How about mods arbitrarily banning and removing anything and everything because they feel like it and there's no recourse for the community, and everything is kept in the dark. A cursory look at /r/watchredditdie provides more than enough specifics about what's to dislike.
Spez decided to reject that and focus on reddit as a mainstream platform, and as such, disallow and get back the power from the communities and their mods. It'll lower the weird good quality the site has and they will never compete with tiktok for mass attention.
You're right that reddit owns the website, but they don't own the communities. And right now, they're loosing peoples goodwill as well.
I feel you think the answers are obvious. They are not to me.
I am glad these subreddits have been returned back to the community, perhaps the Reddit staff can moderate for now.
The community voted on the changes. You can go look up the polls that were held for yourself.
>perhaps the Reddit staff can moderate for now
Lol. Not a viable business model for reddit. Their entire revenue is less than what facebook spends on just moderation.
I hope so. Put their money where their mouth is if they want the rules they refuse to put in the TOS.
But from your POV, we both know that won't happen. They just recruite more power hungry, egotistical jerks because it's cheap. And you'll continue to hate them.
But by now they have probably irrecoverably destroyed their relationship to the existing community. Maybe they can build a new community.
But yes. This isn't just some freak accident explosion from mods. This has been bubbling up for at least 7 years and is partially a result of Reddit refusing to help their free labor continue to give free labor.
Which is sad because it WORKED. Mods just made their own tools or used the tools of other. But now Reddit is taking those tools away instead of promising better native support.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20230612074029/https://old.reddi...
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36434885>
In Russian there's a saying that can be translated as "doorman (or consiege/bouncer) syndrome", where an otherwise pitiful person (a doorman controlling access to some venue, more common in Soviet union even for e.g. dorms) has a little bit of local power and discretion and uses it in at best arbitrary, and at worst actively malicious and power-trippy way, because they can. That's your average /vocal/ internet moderator.
A good example from Reddit is recent /r/comicbooks case where any mention of Rippaverse comics were being removed and users banned because one of the mods disagrees with the author's right-libertarian politics. It's even worse in Facebook groups where I've seen mods remove users for no reason, including someone who happened to create/join the mod team on the first major city-wide board-gaming group banning a bunch of people explicitly over politics (not discussing politics in the group, just having wrong politics at all), because "it's muh group!" (pretty much an actual quote)
Why would reddit stand for losers on a power trip controlling a community for a popular topic on their property, just because they were "there first"? It makes no sense. I totally buy an argument that most users just want to participate, and they only need mods to maintain the manners and clean up spam.
Reddit should just kick all the mods out from the major/general-purpose/large-geographical-entity subreddits, and have paid mods to do the above.