I briefly skimmed and they started talking about manorial systems and vassalage.
I think we tend to shoot ourselves in the foot with definitions and whatnot whenever we try to talk about Feudalism, especially when we concentrate on the dark ages and the middle ages and the lack of a functioning state.
My suspicion is: Feudalism didn't start with manorialism in the dark ages.
It started with the predecessor systems to vassalage in the Roman Empire, when there was a very functioning state with a system of vassalage and hierarchy already in place and roots going back to the pre-Empire times of the Republic. It was made worse by Diocletian and noone after Diocletian was either willing or able to fix things.
yes and.. you are looking at the top.. nice views! but the mass of people, their entire lives, were not at the top. Serfs, peasants, vassels, indentured servants , slave markets -- look there, at the labor force, and compare the herding of cattle to no-rights people, for comparison to intelligent, able, digital serfs.
There is a difference. 'No-rights' people were corralled and restrained, by force when necessary. Where is the violence today? At best, there is a threat that you will lose your job ( it is not insignificant, but it is not your life ). Can reddit put you in acid mines? No. Can they fire you? Well, the mods there are volunteers. Their status indicates how quickly they could pick up and their toys and move. There is only one thing that makes them digital serfs. Inertia.
( yes, I am aware how difficult it is to have a website these days that scales, but the only thing that is really stopping people from doing things is that doing things is hard; it is easier to do what you did yesterday )
My secondary joke reference is asbestos factory ( also technically not existing, but the concept is the same -- highly dangerous environment ). Obviously, I exaggerated a little bit.
Based on their other comment they are just using it as an exaggeration. But it did make me interested enough to look it up.
Apparently there are some inorganic solid acids, they look to mostly be oxides, I have no idea if they exist in high enough concentrations to be mined.
> Feudalism didn't start with manorialism in the dark ages.
There is a hint of that in the excellent Histoire de la France rurale (History of Rural France), in the first [1] of the three volumes.
As far as I remember by the late 200s - going into the 300s present-day Île-de-France was littered with Roman villas which were, in effect, very similar to the future manors. Any one of those villas was headed by the pater familias, followed by his close relatives and by the villa's dependents, who dependants nowadays someone might call "serfs" and "oppressed" (like the author of the article does when talking about the dependants of the féodalité), but who were, most probably, neither of that (meaning they were not real serfs/slaves and they were not that oppressed).
For those interested, Roger Agache [2] has done an excellent job of documenting the existence on the ground of those villas/manors based on aerial archeology. This page [3] does a good job at presenting some of Agache's work (including some photos), the French Ministry of Culture used to have a page dedicated to aerial archeology but, unfortunately, I now see that it has been taken down.
One of the core points is that "Feudalism" as used outside of academic discussion loses its semantic meaning beyond being a synonym for "oppressive". And so trying to discuss when feudalism starts inevitably falls into a discussion of "when did Europe get oppressive".
I don't think so. In the context of tech feudalism maps really well. People cannot protect their own forums/communities running on their own hardware from attack and/or futureshock from rapid change in underlying libs. So everyone depends on single entities with enough resources to keep community software running.
My suggestion: use the term "Patron/Client" instead of feudalism and you'll be able to see/show all the cruddy political effects without having to map everything in Techbroland to the legalities of grazing sheep.
The argument isn't that "feudalism" maps poorly onto modern concepts, it's that "feudalism" is a modern concept that doesn't exist as such historically. It seems to map well onto modern forms of oppression because the word is essentially synonymous with oppressive behavior.
I would avoid the use of the term "Dark Ages". It has always been a loaded term (popular with those who had or have an ax to grind against the Church, like Protestants and Enlightenment propagandists) and characterizes our own ignorance better than the time period itself. The Renaissance itself is better understood as a development of the Middle Ages. The continuity and interplay of cultural currents during the Middle Ages/Renaissance are far more interesting than the simplistic, boring, and tendentious presentation we're often taught in school (Middle Ages = bad, backwards, ignorant; Renaissance = good, progressive, enlightened). For example, while empirical science saw a development during the Renaissance, it depended on prior intellectual of the Scholastic period, itself marked by a good deal of philosophical rigor, for lack of a better term (a rigor unjustly mocked by Protestants, surviving to this day in expressions involving the number of angels on the head of a pin). Whatever the merits of the Renaissance and faults of the Middle Ages, philosophically, the Renaissance falls short of the Middle Ages.
The Dark Ages is called that because it refers to the power vacuum left behind in the wake of the Western Roman Empire's fall. The regional power that maintained law and order was no more and it was now every man for himself. Economies and cultures can't flourish and will recede when everyone is busy murdering and backstabbing each other, thus called the Dark Ages.
It wasn't until Charlemagne united most of Gaul and created the Frankish Kingdom that some semblance of peace was restored, ushering in the Middle Ages and the return of economic growth and cultural development.
As an aside, everything I read and was taught about the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, and the Renaissance back in my day was deeply intriguing and rich in wisdom and knowledge. It saddens me greatly if it's all been whitewashed down to "Dark Ages wrongspeak, Early Middle Ages rightspeak" and "Middle Ages backwards, Renaissance forwards" today because that is so grossly worthless.
It's called that pejoratively against the post-roman era because petrarch was, in the fad of his time, a classical antiquity fetishist and considered the romans the "light" against which the darkness was compared.
It isn't used by modern historians because that concept and the light-vs-dark dichotomy isn't useful, as a historical practice. The idea that all local order collapsed with the roman empire is simply mythology, anachronistic veneration of a hierarchical system of power.
The romans were at least as violent as anything that came after. The idea that they provided unique stability in exchange for that violence is the roman justification for it. Vestigial propaganda from 2000 years ago. We are not obligated to accept it and in fact modern historians typically do not.
The facts of history may not change, but our understanding of it develops like any other academic discipline. Maybe don't reject a generation's worth of development in a complex field because your surface-level appraisal makes you sad.
> Do not say, “Why is it that the former days were better than these?” For it is not from wisdom that you ask about this.
> The romans were at least as violent as anything that came after. The idea that they provided unique stability in exchange for that violence is the roman justification for it. Vestigial propaganda from 2000 years ago. We are not obligated to accept it and in fact modern historians typically do not.
Did they not reduce the amount of fighting? Was Pax Romana a myth? There would be less fighting between regions since most of the regions are already under the control of the regional superpower. Those that haven't been annexed would be wise to conserve their strength if they wish to maintain their independence.
> The majority of modern scholars avoid the term [Dark Ages] altogether due to its negative connotations, finding it misleading and inaccurate. Despite this, Petrarch's pejorative meaning remains in use, particularly in popular culture, which often simplistically views the Middle Ages as a time of violence and backwardness.
It's named the Dark Ages because 11th century scholars wanted to feel like their time period was enlightened and great compared to the past, not because there was some deep, thoughtful analysis.
> It saddens me greatly if it's all been whitewashed down to "Dark Ages wrongspeak, Early Middle Ages rightspeak" and "Middle Ages backwards, Renaissance forwards" today because that is so grossly worthless.
It always is alarming how often you see people say "smart people don't say X anymore, smart people say Y now," and a large segment of people jumps on board without any critical thought. It's not that criticism of the term is entirely without merit, but such criticism could be applied to all simplistic labels for historical epochs. Yet you don't see people take such issue with terms like "Bronze Age Collapse," because these comments aren't coming from a consistent intellectual framework, but rather from people mindlessly repeating a shibboleth.
> Yet you don't see people take such issue with terms like "Bronze Age Collapse," because these comments aren't coming from a consistent intellectual framework, but rather from people mindlessly repeating a shibboleth.
And because medievalists are personally invested in pushing the relativist notion that the early medieval period was just as sophisticated as the Roman Empire that preceded it.
The Dark Ages were dark for a segment of Europe. The Roman Empire was still going strong in the east. The Bronze Age Collapse happened across a much larger area.
You seem to be confused. The Bronze Age Collapse refers to events mostly centered in the Eastern Mediterranean, even though there were impacts elsewhere. The Dark Ages refers to events mostly centered in the Western Mediterranean as well as Western Europe, even though there were impacts elsewhere.
If anything, the area of the Dark Ages looks to be larger than that of the Bronze Age Collapse. But either way, they're both referring to events that happened within a specific geographic area.
Thinking about it, there may actually be a strong link.
Reddit spent the last few years badgering mods into "combating misinformation". A war against an 'enemy' is an 'easy' way to get people in line.
For example, the science sub banned people for linking an official EU recommendation against more than 4 vaccines, or for questioning the natural origin theory. That's not science; it's antithetical to science.
Repeat this at scale, over millions of users, tens of thousands of subs, thousands of links, hundreds of concepts, over years; all powered and amplified by LLM powered bots and shadowy PR teams.
Complicit mods, those who didn't give much of a toss about free speech or independent thought, were selected for and elevated during this process.
Meanwhile, users and moderators who didn't like the idea of censoring alternate and legitimate viewpoints have been leaving / shadowbanned / marginalized for the past couple years.
Would the resistance of Reddit users and mods have been stronger without the above circumstances? I think it actually made a huge difference.
Reddit today is far worse than Reddit 4 years ago. Reddit tomorrow will be exponentially worse again, I have no doubt. The Corona "misinformation war" has been a large factor in that.
Perhaps you didn’t have controversial views in the past 3 years. Ideas that one was banned for as recently as last year under the umbrella of misinformation are now acceptable and even common knowledge in some cases. That’s real mass suppression of discourse. This has an effect on social networks. (Edit: the suppression continues. The original thread is flagged right now. It said the campaign against “misinformation” led to the crazy situation on Reddit and Twitter that we have today.)
Think of it like a seismograph [0]. A violent swing in one direction is proceeded by a violent swing in the other direction. We’re living through the big swings right now.
I think it’s reductive to blame a single person. The people at the top are usually vessels for the people’s energy anyways. That’s why running these institutions is so hard, because you constantly feel powerless even though you’re responsible for making all the decisions.
We should find ways to settle each other, and I think that starts with setting ourselves and those close to us like our family and friends.
I’d be interested to see where if at all the economic incentives in these systems reflect previous political systems (like feudalism) - my guess is that this is where the metaphors break down.
For example there was a tangible consumable result of sharecropping - food that you eat. Youtube is the same sharecropping system, you get a small percentage of the product you produce (advertising revenue) for the organization (YouTube) who provide the property that you use.
For a feudalism - Reddit comparison, where is the economic compensation? Answer: there isn’t any that is facilitated by the platform.
So this can’t be compared as it’s a different economic system. I’ve heard it argued that some moderators are getting paid or whatever but I’ve seen no evidence of this and as a moderator and founder of 100,000 person Sub, that is very popular fora small community, at no point have we been approached as the moderator team by Reddit or otherwise, to be compensated for our work. Reddit uses 100% volunteer work and the entirety of the Reddit content moderation structure is Volunteer on top of a strict corporate hierarchy. I’m not actually sure we have a name for that in political theory (anyone have any ideas?)
I appreciate the differentiation here - even if there’s limited expected application for the layperson using the phrase colloquially in an Internet forum.
Crazy. I post under my real name on reddit and I'm a moderator for our local community. I've never gotten any sort of real threat, but its concerning that it ever happens since I'm so easily found in reality.
It's one of the dangers of moderating on the Internet. Back when I was doing it, I had to deal with everything from death threats to foreign police (suicidal users) to white supremacists to the FBI (bomb threats) on a fairly regular basis. It's proportional to the size of the community and how strong the social expectations are, but the interconnected nature of the Internet means that you'll get drive-by attacks just by being accessible. I know more than one mod that had to resign their duties/accounts because someone started stalking them across other platforms and in real life.
You earn karma by posting popular content. You can do that whether you are a mod or not.
(Well, in some cases a jealous mod might remove your posts, and then re-post them as their own. So if you are willing to abuse your mod position, then you can earn karma by leeching off your users.)
It’s funny how the responses are so critical of the idea, which reveals that Reddit hasn’t really done all that much with karma- in the sense that the idea of using reputation systems as actual currency, or social credit and the like, was regularly theorized as a future post-scarcity sort of thing in sci-fi stories, yet the company never went far enough with it to experiment in that decision. So Reddit karma is less valuable than MMO in-game currency.
that's probably a good thing, because karma isn't really a representation of actual quality so much as it's mass-market appeal and bandwagoning.
you can crank out great posts in a 100k-1m user discussion sub all day and you'll never make anywhere near as much karma as popping into PCMR and doing "NVIDIA bad" "4060 too expensive" one-liner shitposts. 100x the karma for 0.1x the effort.
Gold hasn't existed for years when they cancelled it and made reddit premium which also happened to be 3x as expensive and offered less.
That was also when I stopped my subscription and the start of the downfall of reddit IMO. This started way before spez was CEO. I think it was Ellen Pao during her time of "making reddit profitable".
But I don't think reddit will ever be profitable. The value extraction on users and the big money interests are so counter to niche communities that made reddit what it was, that reddit will just kill itself over it.
I'm sure it will still exist in some form. But not as we know it (or have any kind of use for). Similar to how predecessor https://digg.com still exists but is just around to serve no one.
Not sure if this is the answer, but if instead of looking at money economics, we look at entertainment economics. Instead of producing crops, people produce entertainment. Instead of being paid with money, they are paid with status/validation/power.
I am insufficiently familiar with the feudalism metaphor to claim it doesn't break down, but on a cursory glance, it seems to hold up.
Entertainment is one piece, but the control of information and narrative is far more critical. Think election victory or losses, capital city riots, business boycots, and opinions towards LGBTQ+ etc. I've always believed flesh and blood died in wars but the war was really over thinking. In today's insular, isolated, community-deprived world, your social media (for many people at least) is their only way to interact with or understand the world at all.
It seems like because there isn’t a direct economic exchange, we still want to squeeze that transactional milieu into the equation to answer “why would somebody do something if they aren’t paid.”
So the only possible result, because the assumption is that nobody does anything is that isn’t selfishly compensated, is that there MUST be a psychic - non-priced - selfish benefit to the user. That might be true but I’m not sure that you can use those interchangeably because the latter has no pricing mechanism.
Using an example to illustrate this, if Reddit it came to me and attempted to charge me to moderate my sub, I would say no. If they offered to pay me to moderate, I would also say no because that would come with an expectation, or some kind of SLA or otherwise that I am not prepared to give.
No, I actually think that there’s another organizational structure here that we’ve just not seen or have a name for. Namely it’s where volunteers provide labor for privately owned property, have some control over said property but receive zero of the excess economic value produced by the mix of property holder and labor.
Procedurally:
1. Reddit the organization fronts some amount of capital to provide the platform
2. Volunteers then stake claim to manage and curate limited sub-properties (sub reddits)
3. Reddit the organization sells advertisement placement within the volunteer properties - completely separate from and without the collaboration with subreddit moderators
4. Reddit then keeps 100% of the advertising dollars and zero go to the moderators (or for that matter active members who arguably make the bulk of valuable contributions via content that drive revenue)
Contributions to “open source” that are not on publicly distributable licenses would fall into this category also.
Note here, I’m not using this particular point to complain about the structure - even though I believe it’s not a good structure. I’m simply pointing out that this is a structure that exists for which we don’t really have a coherent understanding of in my opinion
> Using an example to illustrate this, if Reddit it came to me and attempted to charge me to moderate my sub, I would say no. If they offered to pay me to moderate, I would also say no because that would come with an expectation, or some kind of SLA or otherwise that I am not prepared to give.
If Reddit came to you and tried to charge you to keep the subreddit running at all – as in, it'd be deleted from the web if the mods didn't pay – would that change the answer here? I have this suspicion that – for at least some smaller subs – it would.
And for bigger ones, I would guess mods might not... perhaps because they guess Reddit is already making enough ad money off their work for that exchange to seem unfair.
> If Reddit came to you and tried to charge you to keep the subreddit running at all – as in, it'd be deleted from the web if the mods didn't pay – would that change the answer here? I have this suspicion that – for at least some smaller subs – it would.
Only speaking for myself and not the rest of the mod team but I would still say no
moderators got what are they wanting the most - power over their little garden where they can do whatever the f they want with people.
they mad now realising their power was not absolute and they can be kicked out of community the same way they regularly kick their peasants.
A person never getting banned from a subreddit isn't some badge of honor. All it shows is they're a good sycophant who never says anything that would make the lords mad. How can such a person know he has a backbone at all, if he bends to all power?
It seems like you just confirmed my original comment. Thanks.
If you think the average person that gets banned in a sub is some sort of freedom fighting martyr, then you frankly don't really know much about the subject.
I am not Aleklart, so I cannot logically confirm anything about Aleklart's history on reddit.
> If you think the average person that gets banned in a sub is some sort of freedom fighting martyr,
I'm saying that average people get banned from subreddits all the time for completely innocuous remarks. Never getting banned isn't a badge of honor, all it shows is that you're skillful at never stepping on the toes of mods despite the capricious nature of reddit's moderation. That's nothing to be proud of.
> I'm saying that average people get banned from subreddits all the time for completely innocuous remarks.
I'm am saying my past 14 years on reddit do not confirm your statement.
Sure if you go to r/conservative and say something blue, you get insta-banned, because they do indeed hate free speech there, but this type of situation is the vast majority of "innocuous remarks getting somebody banned" : not understanding the subreddit.
> Never getting banned isn't a badge of honor
I'm not sure why you keep bringing this up, because nobody said it was, a straw man.
If you go to a red subreddit and say something blue, it isn't surprising that you'll be banned from the red subreddit. But you're also likely to be banned from the blue subreddits as well, and even gray subreddits that have no overt political affiliation, simply because you associated with the red. Despite not being a radical, you can catch bans simply for arguing with radicals. This is what I mean when I say that regular people frequently catch capricious bans on reddit.
> I'm not sure why you keep bringing this up, because nobody said it was
I bring this up because I am responding to your attempt to shame Aleklart, with the implication that he did something worthy of getting himself banned:
> Your post really comes off as if you are sore about being banned from some sub.
Suppose he did get banned, does that imply he did something to deserve getting banned? No. Because reddit bans are frequently capricious. And if he was banned for no good reason, is it shameful that he was banned? No. And if you never get banned for capricious reasons, is that meritorious? Also, no. Quite the contrary in fact.
Legitimately curious - do you have any evidence that the average reddit account is banned from multiple subreddits all the time?
I've had multiple accounts I've been using for years with hundreds of posts/comments and as far as I know I've never been banned anywhere, and it's not like I haven't gotten into arguments or put forward opinions. I've had posts deleted, but always because I hadn't formatted it properly or followed some rule, but even that didn't lead to a ban.
I'm always so curious what subreddits all the people on here who seem to feel like they're engaged in some war against the man are getting banned from. I was mostly using reddit for talking about like... coffee and cocktails and architecture and a couple video games. There weren't pages of deleted comments or ongoing flamewars, it was mostly people just chatting about their common hobbies.
I'm not unaware that there are other subreddits with more controversial stuff, but this sort of comment just feels like people claiming that everyone else is a sheep if they haven't been kicked out of a grocery store or a public park. I'm really curious what percentage of reddit's MAUs are folks who are experiencing which sort of subreddits mostly.
The reason behind their ban tends to be banal, as it typically aligns with what you would expect: Vaccine denialism, and so on, almost always intruding into an unrelated discussion.
The effectiveness of proper moderation is what largely keeps it from catching your attention.
The implication that anybody who's been banned from a subreddit is probably an antivaxxer or some other form of cretin, cute. In reality, reddit has automod bots mass banning countless thousands of accounts without consideration for their position, simply because of where they said a thing and not the thing that was said. And you can even catch bans for criticizing this because the mods employ the same pattern you have; anybody criticizing their capricious moderation must surely be a terrible cretin!
Ah I see rarely is it the case that they uttered regrettable or abhorrent remarks; the outcome always stems from either a conspiracy or an authoritarian moderator reveling in their power.
Are the automod bots a conspiracy? Conspiracy.. that's a new word that means any crazy obviously false theory right? If I insinuate that somebody is a conspiracy theorist, that proves they are wrong of course.
Would you like to give an actual example of a subreddit you're banned from because you were posting in some other subreddit? Or evidence that that's happening to the average reddit user?
I certainly believe it happens, but the times I've heard it come up was generally because of brigading and harassment from one subreddit towards another, which certainly sweeps up some folks who just happened to be posting on both, but feels reasonable enough, situation depending.
I just don’t buy this argument, it’s built on pure anecdote.
Can you provide a falsifiable hypothesis and data that would point to support?
So the hypothesis would be something like: For the population of Reddit moderators, over 50% percent are primarily incentivized by dictatorial ego actions rather than community support actions as measured by evaluating the following moderation actions (ban, delete etc), over the time period 2007-2023.
Your "compensation" is you get to use Reddit. They wrote the software, run the servers, manage the user accounts, by nature of their product and brand bring people to the site and then your sub (and potentially others).
Let's not act like Reddit itself hasn't been extremely valuable to these communities. It's just untrue that the mods do the only important work to build subreddits.
A lot of subs I'm in have low touch mods and I'm fairly sure if they didn't do it someone else easily would have. Hasn't dropped them from thinking they had fiat power and rights to shut down the subreddit despite many active users wishing to continue using Reddit.
So what do you call that economic system in which individual people volunteer to improve privately owned property and the only “compensation” is simply the opportunity to use/improve private property.
And again, unlike sharecropping, volunteers get zero of the property as fiat to convert.
Preemptively there’s no possible pathway to claim that Reddit is a “Public Commons”, because nobody but the legal owners and their designated controllers, determine the distribution of value or future of the property.
I think you're really misapplying labor politics to a casual website. I'd even go as far to say that comparing being a reddit mod to share cropping to be tasteless and offensive! I wouldn't say that opinion in public with my face & name associated with it, that's for sure.
Mods can Just Quit. They can go self-host. Nobody is making them use Reddit. This isn't a labor situation where anyone's livelihood is at stake.
I will never stop giggling at this. What reddit actually, actually provides is not technically impressive for anyone that's done relatively anything at scale. In fact, it's impressive how utterly shit the site operates most of the time, given the only, the ONLY THING THEY DO is develop and run it.
And yet, I still basically can't watch ANY DAMN VIDEO on the site now that I can't use 3P clients, yes, years after it's introduction the video player is still worse than stepping in dog shit.
It's a database, some over engineered piles of JS to load a list of links, and by reddits own messaging, a crap API. It's really not special. The mods and users made it what it is, in spite of what it is.
Okay go stand up another Reddit then that anyone can create a subreddit on. It'll probably be better, right? Reddit isn't stopping anyone. People have migrated off sites before (digg). Go on then, angry Redditors! It's not a strike if you're too feckless to walk away.
Lol, many of us have, but thanks for breaking out one of the three tropey abuse-excusing talking points that get rehashed here every other day.
> Reddit then that anyone can create a subreddit on. It'll probably be better, right?
I've never had a topic like reddit get people so eager to shove words in my mouth. REDDIT GOT LUCKY and maybe were calculating it how they used free labor. They didn't make anything, they have no unique value prop after losing power users and moderators.
And despite what some funny people here say, the frontpage is a laughingstock still. When I peek once a week, because yes, I actually have some self-wilp and self-determination and feel no need to prop up shitty little platforms run by shitty lying little dictators. I know, shocking that some of us have values, and we even live them.
Instead of creating more strawmans to put in my mouth, why not actually rise to the discussion and tell me what reddit has that no one else can touch. I think you've conceded it's not tech.
Right it's not tech - it's their product that people enjoy using that is what drew a lot of people to Reddit. Especially in its growth years. Subreddits as a concept are a really great product idea and one thing that struck me as innovative and cool when I joined. And the subreddit product feature is why I've gotten to be in multiple niche interest-based forums hosted on Reddit that probably wouldn't have existed otherwise.
To act like Reddit-the-product is valueless and did nothing right to get to where it is today is just silly.
> For a feudalism - Reddit comparison, where is the economic compensation? Answer: there isn’t any that is facilitated by the platform.
The one angle I can see is selling access and priority on the sub externally. It’s clearly against the terms of service, but if done within the parameters of the sub it blends in fairly easily.
A good analogy is the private tax collectors in old Europe. The right to collect taxes would be sold to a private individual. In this case, the mods would be paying with their time to manage the rest of the sub and Reddit would turn a blind eye to paid mod abuse.
The feudalism model stands up, where Reddit is the kingdom, reddit executives and employees are nobles and the king’s men. That means the mods and users are viewed as part of the land, just as serfs. Any mod who date challenge the crown will be discredited, accused and stripped of what little they have.
Just as in feudalism, you see the crown trying to govern by dividing the people and making them focus on survival so that the crown’s taxes flow and they dare not challenge local landowner.
I think the reason people balk at this is because in the case of physical property, you’re talking about literally life and death. It’s hard to make similar comparisons with text on computer screens.
So irrespective of whether or not structurally it makes sense, people I think are fighting with the comparison because the stakes are so different
Mods are pretty clearly the nobles who landhold and collect taxes/etc. Not really a member of the court or the royal institution, but entitled (literally - Baron, Duke, etc are literal titles) and commissioned by the royal institution to rule over a small fief in the day-to-day matters.
The king wants the kingdom to run smoothly, and the baron makes that happen. If they do a shitty job they can be removed. On the other hand most barons won't want to let things get to that point, because it's still way better than being an actual serf (assuming they're not punished/executed).
And yes, many mods do derive personal satisfaction and power and influence (banning people they find particularly disagreeable, or particularly skilled at calling out a particular bit of bullshit the mod wants to push) in their work.
I've experienced the "you're banned on a random comment for no explanation, and if you modmail and ask why you're modmuted for a month instantly with no reply" personally as well, in a large discussion sub, over something completely innocuous.
> For a feudalism - Reddit comparison, where is the economic compensation
You can control political conversation, you can control criticism of products and companies, you can pump up stocks, you can encourage the spread of useful rumors within industries, etc...
There are people paid full time to manipulate Reddit (and other networks.) The people and states employing them must be fools to waste so much money for no economic reward.
edit: this is aside from the people just trying to feel powerful, who will obviously be everywhere. It's hard, unpaid work. People doing it will tend to either be very strange or being paid from some other source. No different than Wikipedia, honestly.
> There are people paid full time to manipulate Reddit (and other networks.) The people and states employing them must be fools to waste so much money for no economic reward.
This is a strawman.
Of course there are people paid to influence every single public opinion website from Twitter to Hacker News. That is a completely separate question as to what the economic incentives of moderators are.
The only way that makes sense is if you are making the claim that the plurality of moderators, or at least some exceptionally high percentage, are paid or otherwise compensated by somebody else to manipulate their subreddits.
There is no data to indicate that this is a widespread coordinated or otherwise repeatable business practice such that we could say that it is an economic system, comparable to other economic systems.
For generic subreddits, they can censor submissions & posts about certain products, while looking the other way at brigaded posts related to some other product. I dont even mention the most blantant things like stickying some topic.
This was made to eleven on all those crypto subreddits where there was tons of drama for mods pushing a certain crypto, or point of view, while ignoring other (e.g. drama between /r/bitcoin and /r/btc).
In gaming subreddits mods often get the chance to fly to some event hosted by the company that makes the game, or get in game things. So they arent "paid", but they certainly "listen" to the company (if they dont listen, they wont get a plane ticket and a hotel room + other "benefits).
Not to mention power mods, that are hungry for power and trade spots to moderater. There was that person who "moderated" 300 subreddits by trading spots and they could ban you from those 300 subreddits. Imagine that person got bribed to ban you? The new rage is trading spots by sock-puppet accounts, so it is not so visible.
The worst is, that we could easilly make a "better reddit" with multiple solutions: public and semi public subreddits, where users can vote on rules and vote on mods, public mod queue, super-mods reviewing it, users reviewing it and finally admins reviewing it. To have multiple methods to constantly chase for cliques (wikipedia in theory has it, but it's a complete parody - if 2 admins defend each other an user cannot do anything + admins selectively enforce rules: they use them on you, but not their own -> again this could be solved with anonymization of posts for review). Also to make it work it would have to have reviws by admins to ban brigaders (old style attacks with sock puppets blocking or allowing everything - like upvotes/downvotes worth 0).
I dont understand why apart from HN, there isnt any rich person who makes a board the way 'it should be'. Users would pay money for decent discussion.
Feudalism had a mutual benefit. And feudalism isn’t sharecropping. Residents of the manor had some protection from the lord and the kingdom as compared to people outside of that system. Would I want to live as a peasant? No… but that was the human condition for a long time. And a small freeholder wasn’t necessarily better off than a serf at various points in history. Sharecroppers are just tenants, who often get trapped using the “company store” (ie captive suppliers etc) and make little or nothing.
YouTube is not the same as Reddit. A YouTube creator benefits from the platform and is paid for performance. It more like a record label type model. Reddit is different - as you said, moderators get no economic benefit. They just are the petty kings of a message board, and do a bunch of work for the company for free.
Reddit’s problem is there has never been a moat or a business. Their api made it easy for google to index them and gave them outsized influence. But they got too much investment and always had an ineffective team incapable of developing a coherent strategy to deliver the returns required to the investors. Examples are everywhere… old.reddit.com should not exist. If IPO was the path, it shouldn’t be a huge porn platform.
> Reddit uses 100% volunteer work and the entirety of the Reddit content moderation structure is Volunteer
Perhaps this is a fundamental flaw with the platform. I see no reason why the people hosting and curating the communities shouldn't have a share of the money generated from them.
I've been working on a platform called Sociables to help address this problem. On the platform, people who create and run the communties have optional means of renumeration baked into the platform such as offering monthly membership plans, selling "awards" that can be assigned to comments and posts, donations, and more.
While it's not a fit for every type of community, I think aligning the incentives of the platform provider with the sources of where the the value is created (the communities) is crucial for fostering a healthy environment and avoiding this situation where the platform goes to war against itself.
> I’m not actually sure we have a name for that in political theory (anyone have any ideas?)
"Useful idiots"?
You're doing useful work, creating a community, for free. But if you analyze that in political or economic terms, you're doing work for free that enhances the wealth and/or power of someone else. So if politics or economics is your framework, then the phrase I quoted might fit.
There cannot be feudalism without the narrative of an omnipotent god to justify class inequality.
There needs to be a strong narrative to justify why some people get free stuff and others don't.
Ok. I stand corrected about a god specifically but I stand by the idea that there needs to be a strong supernatural narrative. If there is no god, there needs to be some kind of future reward for accepting a low rank in current society. Buddhism provides a nirvana/afterlife narrative to justify why people should accept/embrace suffering in the current life so it serves the same purpose as a god.
There is still the promise of potentially being freed after some time and most people who were there believed to some extent that they deserved to be punished for being a bad communist.
If the class difference is big, the narrative to justify the difference must be strong; even under serfdom or slavery, there were uprisings when the narrative was weak. The lowest class has to be (to some degree) content with their situation.
> Buddhism provides a nirvana/afterlife narrative to justify why people should accept/embrace suffering in the current life so it serves the same purpose as a god.
And now you are making a gross mischaracterisation of nirvana. It is nothing like Heaven (Buddhism has heavens and hells too, or higher and lower planes of existence). And no, nirvana does not 'serve the same purpose as a god'.
Isnt AI going to be the "all seeing eye" that keeps tabs on our every action and if we "sin" (have bad credit, basically) - we will be prevented from entering the pearly gated communities.
This occurred to me. With a few generations raised on propaganda with the idea that AI is actually god, it seems plausible. I still think you'd need a severe totalitarian government and a highly compliant population to make this happen.
I despise u_spez but he is cunning. Not only he has a deep knowledge and understanding of reddit moderators (he can easily read all their chat and DM after all), but he quelled their rebellion not even by threatening them with a ban, but simply giving moderation rights to somebody else and the large sub moderators immediately caved at the perspective of losing the power the wield.
> "Large landholders rely on the desperation of the little people to make it possible for them to secure enough borrowed/bought/forced labor to make those larger holdings produce."
This is like half the startups since 2000's, like Amazon warehouse workers and Deliveroo.
Just instead of physical land, their holding are IP, but equally violently protected by the state.
Feudalism lasted for thousands of years, it should be surprising to see bits of it re-emerge
Right or not, /u/spez* really needs to stop relying so strongly on the 'techniques' of the "Marie Antoinette" School of PR**.
* AKA "Steve Antoinette"
** Yes, Antoinette was, really, particularly unfairly maligned and the enduring "PR failure" around her is a more complex and "apocryphal" case-study - but, whether understood this way or in the common vernacular sense, the point holds. See, e.g. and as a starting point: https://guides.loc.gov/women-in-the-french-revolution/marie-...
this is so rambling that i didnt get to the point where they explain why reddit is doomed.
I dont think reddit is doomed, they just need to reign in the moderators and their ban lists, and enable some competition between subreddits (right now it's almost impossible to find alternative subs even if with search)
The point ends up being that, even though moderators who built communities with their own two hands understandably feel an ownership of their subreddit, it’s all just rows in the database of Reddit the company, who is almost certainly going to make things more uniform and try to be more like TikTok (dooming “Reddit as we know it”).
He doesn’t side with Steve or find Steve’s statement to be historically informed, but there are some similarities (and differences) to note if you compare moderators to lords and Reddit/Steve to a king.
The article's point wasn't that Reddit is doomed, it's that Reddit as we knew it (with strong distinctions between sub-reddits) is doomed.
The article basically says "let's play along and say Reddit is like feudalism - then what comes next is early Modern Governments" ie - centralization of power towards absolute centers of power. The article argues that Reddit currently employs moderators because the heterogeneity (ie, strong distinctions of subreddits) are not generally amendable to local control. In order for Reddit to transition to strong centralization that heterogeneity needs to be reduced and managed (in a form similar to how TikTok serves up content in a way that minimizes the ability of 'communities' with heterogeneous norms to form).
It makes Spez the King, that is obvious. The landed gentry were trying to lead a popular rebellion against the King, so the King reminded the commoners that the landed gentry are not their democratic representatives. This doesn't mean the King is suggesting himself to be democratic, of course he isn't and he wouldn't agree to an election for himself. But since the mods claim to be representatives of the commoners in a popular uprising, they framed themselves as democratically legitimate and in doing so, set themselves up to be threatened with elections they know they wouldn't win.
A mod is characterized by their power to moderate. They may also have useful trades, they might also be content creators or blacksmiths who hammer iron, but that isn't what makes them a mod. What makes them a mod is the authority and power, given to them by the King, to strike down any commoner they please.
Calling the reddit mods landed gentry was a stroke of genius. Perfectly calibrated to get under the mods' skin and piss them off, while at the same time driving a wedge between them and the various commoners who already had innumerable personal grudges against the mods. It undermined the perceived legitimacy of the mods and provoked the mods to react emotionally at the same time, making the mods play the victim while simultaneously reminding the commoners who the real victims of the system really were.
You 'curate' in favor of your advertisers. /r/eatcheapandhealthy has some relationship with Leanne Brown. They let that website's marketers astroturf + they link on the sidebar.
On the bright side, HN doesn't hide that they have perverse incentives, they just pretend that astroturfing doesnt exist.
Yeah, you have an audience primed for buying your product, plus the fairly gullible nature of your audience who tend to believe whatever is posted in the comments, it's ideal for advertisers and they're certainly taking advantage. But it doesn't look like reddit is benefiting from any of this. Contrast this to facebook, which has managed to squeeze money from advertisers under a somewhat similar setting.
> Yeah, you have an audience primed for buying your product, plus the fairly gullible nature of your audience who tend to believe whatever is posted in the comments, it's ideal for advertisers and they're certainly taking advantage.
This is why I laugh when people say they include site:reddit.com in their web searches for product reviews. You may as well read amazon reviews; what you're seeing is very likely curated by somebody with a commercial interest in the thing.
> But it doesn't look like reddit is benefiting from any of this. Contrast this to facebook, which has managed to squeeze money from advertisers under a somewhat similar setting.
This has always been reddit's biggest problem; it's cheaper and more effective to astroturf or buy moderators than to buy ads from reddit. Companies that buy ads from reddit are chumps, they should be taking over subreddits instead. The rate of return is far superior.
> This is why I laugh when people say they include site:reddit.com in their web searches for product reviews
when SEO became gamed and the signal filtering was transferred to reddit, it became inevitable that eventually Reddit Optimization would occur for commerce as well.
It's like trying to stomp down on sneakerheads scalping sneakers/GPUs/etc, or fighting hackers in an online game - you have to treat it as a process, not a victory that can be won with a single move, because everytime you make a move they're going to come up with a new strategy to get around it. What matters is that you keep coming up with counterstrategies for those.
Yes, and so is the content creation with original posts, commenting and even just reading and deciding to like or upvote content. That is all labor that adds value and drives eyeballs in.
The space seems ready for a model that pays everyone in the pipeline their true micro share of add and subscription revenue of what they contribute. I can't understand why something that does this hasn't taken over this space yet.
There's crude versions of this with 'Karma', YouTube and twitch streaming revenue, substack, medium, brave rewards and so on. But nothing that just automatically works without sign up and a lot of friction.
> The space seems ready for a model that pays everyone in the pipeline their true micro share of add and subscription revenue of what they contribute. I can't understand why something that does this hasn't taken over this space yet.
Nobody cares about being paid for content when they're all willing to do it for free. When I post on reddit, I'm not doing it for compensation, but for upvotes. Reddit is just another mini-Google.
What we need is a model that is redditesque but not VC funded. Just a small team maintaining something on the lines of old.reddit.com.
> What we need is a model that is redditesque but not VC funded. Just a small team maintaining something on the lines of old.reddit.com.
the problem is that reddit's scale provides value too. those alternatives exist, but nobody wants to post on them because a subreddit/forum with <5 regular commenters is boring and valueless. and the scale provides an endless stream of eyeballs, and low friction of clicking between subs and commenting on a new thing you haven't before (cf: the burden of figuring out 27 different lemmy instances).
in terms of evolutionary advantage, going big is what keeps subs alive, and it's what keeps platforms alive. Someone who is willing to pay to start a centralized reddit 2.0 and establish the definitive r/vacuumcleaners is going to have a market advantage over 30 small lemmy nodes all trying to discuss vacuum cleaners. Especially in anything remotely niche - yeah everyone is discussing video games and politics, but, the really niche hobby interests don't have the user count to survive a 99.9% loss in users.
another related problem is moderation policies: reddit provides a "one size fits all" moderation policy and then allows communities to go tighter, based on the whims of mods. But in the fediverse model, a lot of pods just won't federate with places that have different moderation policies.
There just is a ton of that administrative superstructure that reddit provides that actually adds a lot of value too. And that has been the problem with a lot of the discourse around leaving reddit: the exact reasons Mastodon and Lemmy are having trouble getting traction are the value that Reddit provides in the relationship. People can't solve the problems they can't acknowledge.
And then the mods pretty much pay lip service to user-generated value but then either ignore it or use it as a pawn (going against community votes to reopen, not allowing reopen as an option in the vote, etc) that makes it pretty clear they think they're the real value-add and that reddit would collapse without the dashing handsome moderator who spends 10 minutes scrolling the mod queue while squeezing the lemon on the shitter a couple times a day.
Reddit's scale is still possible with a smaller size team and a smaller budget. Instagram famously had 13 employees when they had as many active users as Reddit does, so running the site is not most of the core issue.
Reddit did not lose money because of the core platform, ie old.reddit.com. Reddit lost money wasting on a number of initiatives like 1.) the mobile app 2.) shitty ad platform. Instagram advertises to me about the next hot restaurant near me, or some small business making a cool Trinket. Google does not get my eyeballs because of adblockers. Reddit serves me ads telling me how IBM is the hottest technology consulting shit in town, when I'm just looking for army compositions for Age of Empires 2.
You say "nobody", but consider how many people would be interested in posting content if they could possibly be paid. There was a time where people simply posted videos on YouTube for free as well, with zero expectation of ad revenue money
No thanks, I'd rather not have more spammers and SEO bloggers on my reddit feed thank you. Reddit is already bad as it is, and the last thing anyone needs is content made solely for views.
YouTube was much better the time there was no revenue share. If they were to one day switch off the revenue spigot (like they seem to be on track to do currently), the creators will still stay. You think MrBeast will leave the platform that gives him access to the eyeballs? He'll just have to find (and find he will) another way to earn his butter.
>I'd rather not have more spammers and SEO bloggers on my reddit feed thank you.
this implies that you don't already need to aggressively tailor your feed (and especially users) to get a sane experience. I'm already digging through 90% muck, not much will change there (or, was. Long since quit reddit specifically outside of very specific communities I haven't found replacements for).
>You think MrBeast will leave the platform that gives him access to the eyeballs?
There's 3 base levels of content creator here to consider:
- small time ones not monetized or barely monetized (under 10k subs or so). These are the ones who probably could make more mowing lawns, let alone minimum wage. This category will have a fluxuation of those who stay because they care more about the clout and/or the content, and those who wanted to one day make a livinig wage on this. Any other who stay and want to be successful would be playing extremely hard to the algorithm, moreso than they already are. They'd fizzle out otherwise.
- Then there's the ones with the hugest range (~100k-2m subs or so) who are anywhere from "this is a good part time gig" to "this is my full time career with a small to medium sized team contributing". This category would be absolutely decimated by the impact. The larger side may have to dowsize and/or reduce the content stream, likely rely much heavier on ad sponsors, and otherwise compromise their content. The smaller side would just fizzle out, full stop. large but not quite large enough to get more ad deals, likely a solo channel with at best 1-2 editors/help on the side. They cannot live off of youtube any longer.
This is where 95% of my feed comes from and it would only make my experience worse.
- Then ofc there's the massive 10m+ subs, the MrBeasts of the world. They are so massive and have so many pools of revenue to draw from (sponsors, merch, "native ads" where they just make a video about a company under the company's dime, crowdfunding sites, commisions, other social media, etc.). Many of these are efectively millionaires and can stop anytime they want. They won't be as strongly affected, maybe have some layoffs and slight slowdown of content. But it's losing 1 of a dozen different ways they make money; unfortunate but not gamebreaking.
This effectively turns Youtube into a place either of pure passion or top level coporations in all but name. I don't see this as a better time. Maybe pre-Google Youtube was a magical place, but there's no closing Pandora's box to return to those times.
To call it bare bones is an understatement, but I do wonder how it or potential other similar sites may work in this modern era. Will people who truly want quality content and discussion put their money where their mouths are? Only time will tell.
That's what mods have been saying the past few weeks, but somehow the site is working fine without them. It turns out that most of them don't add a lot of value and are easily replaceable.
The subs that went private accomplished nothing and many were forced to reopen. Some mods were even deposed.
Reddit will eventually find new mods to replace the ones still protesting, and business will continue as usual. After all, there's no shortage of people who want to lord over others. Moderation isn't some highly skilled activity that requires special qualifications.
>Moderation isn't some highly skilled activity that requires special qualifications.
Neither is cleaning up a beach. You may even get some willing to clean a small part, but having a few people spend exorbitant amounts of time cleaning a beach everyday that is also infested with sharks and crabs starts to turn a simple problem to a specialized one.
There are some great moderators on Reddit who are selflessly keeping their communities afloat. There are also those who are power hungry, routinely abuse their power, accept payments from corporations, and generally make the site a worse place. Mods of most popular/default subreddits more likely than not fall in the latter category.
From all the drama that has happened in there, there were at least an upside - u/awkwardtheturtle, the mod behind the power trips at r/art (allegedly who took down posts from people who according to said mod were "ai generated art" but actually they weren't), was banned.
>There are also those who are power hungry, routinely abuse their power
I see this argument all the time, but isn't this just human nature? In any organized structure, some people are going to seek out "power" and abuse it. You will find people making the same complaint about their neighbor who is the head of the homeowner association. It's also part of why people become cops, or if they can't get there, security guards.
Every broad "type" of community on the internet has had this problem. I remember growing up, there were plenty of capricious IRC moderators and admins as well as moderators of individual forums. Little dictators.
I will say, I feel like there was a concerted effort to frame these API changes as specifically being harmful to those with disabilities and moderators (I guess in an attempt to point to short term, immediate concrete harms that would come from this), which opened things up to reframing the whole discussion around as a referendum on moderation.
And apparently most people can't make a simple connection and ask "Why did Reddit not care about these flagrant power abuses before? Will they keep caring after this is over?"
And it seems like that's been fairly successful. But I still think Reddit has doomed itself with this move.
Yes, it's human nature. The fact Reddit didn't allow bad moderators to be removed played into it, too, which resulted in some oddities of the website: /r/Marijuana was run by assholes, so /r/Trees became the marijuana subreddit. /r/WorldPolitics was run by moderators who didn't actually moderate the content (other than for the absolute "Sitewide Rules" the admins will remove a subreddit for violating) so it wound up with an absurd amount of cartoon porn, which lead to /r/Anime_Titties becoming the subreddit to discuss world politics.
It's funny lore and it lead to the site having culture of a sort, but it points to a failure in upper-level administration. Reddit simply doesn't care about the product it's putting out, beyond some very basic rules aimed at trying to prevent the site itself from being sued, and it shows.
>The fact Reddit didn't allow bad moderators to be removed played into it, too
I tried to "play the tape through" on this, and imagine what it looks like. If Reddit had proactively tried to implement some kind of intervention system to remove abusive moderators from subreddits.
It puts Reddit as an organization in a tough position, because they have to mediate disputes. And it opens up a bunch of other questions. How big does a subreddit have to be before they qualify for this intervention system? Does one submit an organized case like filing a lawsuit? What if the accused moderator is the only moderator of the subreddit?
And what new rules does Reddit add to try to curb abusive moderators? There'd have to be some kind of ethical guidelines drawn up. So now unpaid moderators can be disbarred like lawyers?
Every thing I think of (admittedly not having spent a ton of time thinking about this) is open to potential abuse. Even if you set the trigger to be a 90% vote of "no confidence" by subscribed members of the subreddit, the subreddit would be vulnerable to "raids". If you gate it to "you have to have been subscribed for X amount of time" the time will either be too short and leave raiding or create a new "class" of "landed gentry" that have a disproportionate say in how the subreddit is run.
So I don't know if it's actually a failure. Some of the stuff Reddit did early on, things like vote fuzzing etc... show a willingness to experiment with using the platform itself to enforce better behavior. They might have been able to figure something out, eventually. But then I think of really simple stuff that even Hacker News has implemented (ex. you can't downvote a direct reply to one of your comments) and how Reddit doesn't have that.
I have a different opinion. If you had experienced with the mods on reddit, you will notice that Reddit official stance is: Mods are allowed to do anything they want with their subs. That is the line Reddit as a corporation has endorsed and is the main reason for the "landed gentry" comparison. It is also the problem that caused abusive mods being untouchable.
Reddit does not want to control its moderators in any way. Because of that, they dont even have any willingness to try to make the mods more accountable.
> It puts Reddit as an organization in a tough position, because they have to mediate disputes. And it opens up a bunch of other questions. How big does a subreddit have to be before they qualify for this intervention system? Does one submit an organized case like filing a lawsuit? What if the accused moderator is the only moderator of the subreddit?
Yes. It's not easy.
But Reddit knowingly went into a community moderated forum industry. It's not as if this situation was forced on them. Having some plans for this would have been normal business planning.
A lot of this sounds like the plan was:
1. Cool website
2. ?????
3. Profit!!!
Except they never got to 3 and now are scrambling.
First, I want to say I am not defending Reddit's actions over the past several months or anything Steve Huffman has done during that time. That's not what I am arguing here at all.
What I am arguing is that Reddit did have an established doctrine around subreddits. That doctrine was to give as much autonomy (and free speech) as possible to people who create subreddits. And that was intentional, not a result of lack of planning.
Until now, this has been backed up by their actions over a long timespan. There were many subreddits that Reddit allowed to exist that are almost inconceivable today and only banned after enduring long campaigns of immense public pressure. When they did ban them they changed site guidelines to reflect new rules.
I think overall, the additional content guidelines that were hammered out through this process are fair. I think content guidelines that ban content that may not be illegal but are harmful makes sense. Things like "No non consensual pornography" (aka revenge porn) and "No advocating violence towards groups of people" (no organized racism) are very reasonable.
But it also allowed for subreddits to be created that Reddit as an organization would never have thought of or been able to nourish to a point they became very large. I really think that's what Reddit's secret sauce is and has been.
Gigantic subreddits like r/IAmA, r/todayilearned, r/wholesomememes came from users and grew organically. Yes, this approach has had downsides such as the emergence of powermods and the creation of bad subreddits like r/jailbait and r/fatpeoplehate.
Because of the numerous issues I outlined above, I'm not sure Reddit would have been successfully able to implement or outline a process for keeping the magic of subreddits and a fair system that scales for removing mods and they had no incentive to try. They're going to have to try now though, because I don't think there is any coming back from this.
>It's funny lore and it lead to the site having culture of a sort, but it points to a failure in upper-level administration. Reddit simply doesn't care about the product it's putting out
Does it need to? Reddit doesn't care about the local squabbles, and misleading sub names or bare minimum moderation aren't against their rules. it cares about ad revenue. So while it feels hypocritical to suddenly care about maliciously compliant mods, it's consistent in their goals.
I do agree that even if they don't care, they should fit in SOME ability to hoist a mod by some mixture of the community other mods who disagree but simply weren't there first.
Reddit would simply contract with some paid content moderators overseas, crank out automated moderation tools (With AI, this is easier than ever) and nothing would change.
I worked at a fairly popular social media site about a decade ago and paid content moderation farms were a dime a dozen, I can’t even imagine what it’s like now.
Paid mods will work for the big subreddits, but what about all the smaller ones. Will paid mods have the knowledge or passion to run a subreddit for a niche topic? To promote them or keep them interesting?
those subs may wither but they're not a big revenue source or a big deal in the grand scheme of things. And if the current crop of users leave it doesn't mean nobody is interested in that topic anymore, so the odds are good that users will return in the future.
If the mods are still gone at that point, there's abandoned-subreddit procedures that will be executed.
And that's the part that mods are trying to exploit for griefing with the "it's not closed, we're just not letting anyone post"/"we're only letting people post unfunny memes in protest"/etc. I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you.
Like it's just kind of funny that the mods are literally Going Galt and just like would happen in the real world, they're panicking with the realization that the world is pretty much going to move on without them.
I mean, I just disagree. I'm a mod on two large sub (bicycling and sanfrancisco) and a ton of the work is just done by automod and the users now days.
The main point of contention would be on subs where the user base is divided in it's moderation desires, e.g., san francisco crime posts. Half the users think the city is just fine and the crime posts make them angry, the other half think the city is falling apart, and therefore think the issues is entirely relevant. In this type of situation, the obvious solution is to split the sub like Seattle/SeattleWA did, but both sides want control over the sub.
These cultural control subs are the only ones that I think would "fall apart" without moderation, and even then I think the users would eventually self-select for separate subs.
This whole issue has been bizarre, and I definitely did not have the passion about it that some mods do. Still, I think I'm growing weary of moderating, but I think it's mainly that I'm getting old.
Ehh, maybe, but I wouldn’t bet money on it. I think the biggest problem Huffman has is annoying the user base by shittifying the site for increased earnings. New reddit is god awful, and removing pleasant apps continues the trend.
I’m still able to use the site with minimal bullshit, but I see the wave coming.
The point was to remind the moderators that they aren't the democratic leaders representing the will of users as they framed themselves to be. Some mods are well liked but a great many of them are widely hated and know they would lose elections. Nobody mistakes the King for a democratic leader, even when he threatens the mods with elections. Nobody thinks even for an instant that Spez might let his users vote him out, Spez knows it too. He isn't pretending to be democratic, he's making an overt power play by proposing elections for those under him but not himself.
I wouldn't say mods are unelected. Readers basically vote by visiting the subreddit they mod. If a bunch of mods become too much of a problem, you can just "leave the country". If enough people leave, those mods will just be dictators of an empty subreddit.
You can't "leave the country" for the large default subs. That kind of argument doesn't scale well into the millions+ subs where even if every mods on that board being a dick to 2-3 people a day, they would still need years to make the current population of user to get noticeably affected. And because they are basically the default subs, their new users make up for whoever is leaving anyway.
The mods for those big subs are literally untouchable and can do whatever they want, with no accountability.
What presumably scales well with subreddit size is the amount of spam and abuse moderators have to deal with. So if, on a million+ sub, they manage to only "be a dick to 2-3 people a day", and the subreddit otherwise isn't rapidly bleeding users due to an onslaught of trolls and spammers - I'd say the mods are doing a goddamn great job. It's not like bad actors keep themselves away.
No it wasn't at all, as it just highlights how completely arbitrary his role in the whole thing is.
If mods are landed gentry then spez is a monarch. Unelected, unaccountable to the populace and completely out of touch with their concerns (even more so than the "landed gentry").
In the same way some people may be mad at Trump but more mad at an abusive parent, yes. Maybe Trump even personally influenced that parent to be what they are today, but I don't think that it's a controversial statement to suggest that many people can't properly scale powers and chains of responsibility in their heads.
Even if they do, it may not matter. One is doing immediate, local damage and you'll probably never be in a state to singlehandedly usurp Trump (ignoring for a fact that crow eating is imminent).better to deal with the local problem even if we could objectively agree that Trump has done more damage to a society.
Not sure how many users see it that way. I've always been annoyed with first-mover mods having perpetual control over subreddits (it's especially bad for e.g. some reddits named after countries, which are controlled either by anglocized liberals out of touch with the general public, or worse, sexpats).
But it makes me dislike Steve Huffman all the more when he only brings up the issue of out of control mods when they're doing a protest over a legitimate grievance.
Lol, you think nobles' landholds weren't tenured by the consent and commission of the king?
It's just like being a commissioned military officer, you serve at the pleasure of the President and if you end up being a shitter you're gone and they'll replace you with someone else. Nobility was literally medieval commissions.
I’m astounded you see it as a stroke of genius. Reddit may weather this storm, but spez made it worse at every turn. If their initial goal really was killing third-party clients, there are so many other ways they could have done it without astronomical levels of negative attention. The “landed gentry” sound bite made it to sites like TechCrunch and the verge — not a good look for Reddit’s IPO.
Yeah, that's the point the article makes. My personal favorite is the response to Steve saying
> And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.
which is:
> While I am willing to get hype about the general idea of property inheritance being so anti-democratic in nature that a democratic society must expropriate that property to function, I am guessing Steve Huffman, estimated net worth in the millions Steve Huffman, is not too married to what that implies, and really intends only to speak of inherited authority.
I’ve been thinking similarly[0] about the community ownership/moderation problem[1] and have come to a similar conclusion that I think the next “reddit” will need to move away from moderators and fiefdoms if it wishes to succeed. When the moderation team is great the community flourishes, but too often communities are not well run, and badly led communities eventually crush a platform’s success.
In general the idea of "just use filters" fails. Number one, messages cost money for someone somewhere. Allowing everything and just filtering out bullshit leads to untold amounts of bullshit you have to filter. Hence the point of moderators in the first place...
This feeds into point two. Most people don't want to play moderator and create huge lists of filters in order to not deal with shit. They will gladly farm that off to someone else even if there are considerable potential negative side effects, and if it gets too bad they will pack up and move to a new community with less negative effects.
> Most people don't want to play moderator and create huge lists of filters in order to not deal with shit.
Sure — but think of Ad block filters. Filter lists eventually get developed (eg Easylist), and if the maintainers ever do something radical, users can easily remove one filter list and substitute another.
It’s much harder for users in communities with moderators to do the same — if I get banned from /r/detroit and I live there, what’s my alternative?
I only skimmed the article so I don’t have anything to say about the broader point. But, $3.4m/yr seems like a shockingly low valuation for the amount of work moderators are providing Reddit for free. That would, I think, be a pretty small fraction of how much they pay for engineering, for example.
If Reddit could just pay moderators that money, it seems to me to be an obviously good deal. But I mostly suspect the number is a pretty big underestimate and Reddit couldn’t just do that.
> [Reddit] relies on a vast amount of unpaid volunteer moderation labor – $3.4 million’s worth a year, by one estimate.
I’ve noticed the link to a member-only Medium article[1] that serves as a source for that estimate, but I have to ask—is that a vast amount? It doesn’t feel like a vast amount. It’s at most 30 first-world full-time employees (and even that is a huge stretch) or 4e-3 $/MAU/yr (per a 2021 estimate of 900M monthly active users I picked from search results at random). It feels too small to even pay for the maintenance of the third-party mod tools, let alone the actual (far more numerous) moderators.
Does this number seem plausible to anyone with actual domain knowledge?
Roughly 30% higher when you account for benefits and taxes. This is a significant number for SMBs but insignificant for for a hyper scale tech company.
$3.4 million is a not even funny bad napkin mathematics. Just thinking of the work done by the moderators of /r/science, /r/AskScience, or /r/AskHistorians, not to speak of the moderators that handle celebrities AMA [1], and even $300 million would be a low amount if the platform really cared about the ones that make sure the platform is not a steaming pile of poppycock.
You're making the mistake of assuming that 100% of the unpaid work performed by a few niche subreddits converts to equivalent wages on the free labour market.
Is anyone going to pay first-world wages for someone to moderate a subreddit? It doesn't seem like anyone is willing to do so, because the mods do it for free. Nobody is willing to pay for this service. Social media companies that do pay for moderators tend to pay them not well at all. It's not a great job. It burns people out. It is in fact entry-level no-experience-needed grunt work.
The caveat was "if the platform really cared". For instance, if I was running a platform that had such an interesting (and important, one might argue) social phenomenon as the Ask Me Anything of celebrities or of vacuum repair techs [1] reaching 22+ million people I would pay the ones doing the work way beyond the equivalent wages of "free labour market". But what do I know, I generally regard exploitation as bad and social media companies as a scourge.
Some moderators have public personas which are valuable to a community, have built up trust, have specific hard to find skills, contribute valuable content, etc. If a moderator (or set of moderators) are able and willing to move a community, the market price of their work is the greater of what Reddit is willing to pay them and how much revenue they can receive from moving their community and capitalizing on it themselves.
It's going to be a lot more I'd think. Also remember that those mods are so dedicated and productive that they'll do it for free. How much would Reddit need to pay for for this level of moderation?
How would you even reach some of those people? I'm pretty sure some of them have very specialized domain knowledge and already have full time paid jobs. They aren't in it for the money.
Reddit risking throwing all that away is shows an absurd and extraordinary level of ignorance.
>> [Reddit] relies on a vast amount of unpaid volunteer moderation labor – $3.4 million’s worth a year, by one estimate.
>I’ve noticed the link to a member-only Medium article that serves as a source for that estimate, but I have to ask—is that a vast amount? It doesn’t feel like a vast amount.
I think the comparisons to TikTok are quite apt, and I think there's a further conclusion that is missing from this essay. Long term /u/spez wants to get rid of subreddits, but he needs to do it in a boiling-the-frog kind of way, otherwise the community would revolt even further.
But it's the right way to go from his perspective. In retrospect subreddits were a mistake, allowing individual communities to form in isolation, requiring mods who understood the nuances of each of those communities.
/u/spez wants to figure out how to kill subreddits without actually killing them. My guess is that subreddits will transition over to a hashtag concept. At first, posts will only be allowed to have one hashtag (so it maps to how reddit works today), eventually they will have many. This will kill sub moderation.
All that's left is killing old.reddit.com, he can do that by just gimping the thing and breaking it. Nothing explicitly malicious but just stop putting engineering effort into it and eventually it falls apart. This makes sure all users use "new reddit".
In the new client you won't be able to view subreddits - you will have tag search but it will never be as feature rich as just scrolling the home page.
I have no idea if reddit can compete with tiktok but at this point that's where they'll be. Maybe they hitch on to the "tiktok is stealing your data" wagon and brand themselves as the American Tiktok that is Lawful and Is Not Evil, which can probably get them decently far.
It’s absolutely mad that they can see Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. all experiment with TikTok-type stories and video shorts, fail to be much of anything than a vector for resharing TikToks, and think that Reddit can somehow do it better.
This sounds about right to me. One of the points in the article that was really enlightening to me was the trade-off between lower-risk, subsistance production and higher-risk, but much higher reward excess production. Smaller and more insular communities tend to value the subsistance level production as they don't need to over-produce in order fulfill their community's needs. So, a reddit that is dominated by lots of niche communities that don't want to produce excess value that can be collected in 'rent' or 'taxes', really undermines the big dreams of the VC's that have funded reddit for so long.
Well, the new reddit is already grouping posts by "topics" so you aren't too far off. Get rid of subreddits and boom, it's a tiktok clone. It's already full of reshared tiktok videos anyway.
At first glance I don't see reddit's mods role much different from Twitter community notes contributor or even a wikipedia editor. On the other end of the spectrum you have paid content mods at alphabet or meta.
Yeah, wikipedia is a non-profit and arguably provides a more universal value: so what?
Each model has pros and cons, for the org and for society. I'm not sure if one is always better than the other in any context.
But one thing is clear: the unpaid model invariably leads to an authority-centered model where power over other participants is the payment token. That's how it's been in wikipedia and reddit.
It seems in their new war, reddit want to wrestle that power back to them.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadI think we tend to shoot ourselves in the foot with definitions and whatnot whenever we try to talk about Feudalism, especially when we concentrate on the dark ages and the middle ages and the lack of a functioning state.
My suspicion is: Feudalism didn't start with manorialism in the dark ages.
It started with the predecessor systems to vassalage in the Roman Empire, when there was a very functioning state with a system of vassalage and hierarchy already in place and roots going back to the pre-Empire times of the Republic. It was made worse by Diocletian and noone after Diocletian was either willing or able to fix things.
There is a difference. 'No-rights' people were corralled and restrained, by force when necessary. Where is the violence today? At best, there is a threat that you will lose your job ( it is not insignificant, but it is not your life ). Can reddit put you in acid mines? No. Can they fire you? Well, the mods there are volunteers. Their status indicates how quickly they could pick up and their toys and move. There is only one thing that makes them digital serfs. Inertia.
( yes, I am aware how difficult it is to have a website these days that scales, but the only thing that is really stopping people from doing things is that doing things is hard; it is easier to do what you did yesterday )
Apparently there are some inorganic solid acids, they look to mostly be oxides, I have no idea if they exist in high enough concentrations to be mined.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_acid
There is a hint of that in the excellent Histoire de la France rurale (History of Rural France), in the first [1] of the three volumes.
As far as I remember by the late 200s - going into the 300s present-day Île-de-France was littered with Roman villas which were, in effect, very similar to the future manors. Any one of those villas was headed by the pater familias, followed by his close relatives and by the villa's dependents, who dependants nowadays someone might call "serfs" and "oppressed" (like the author of the article does when talking about the dependants of the féodalité), but who were, most probably, neither of that (meaning they were not real serfs/slaves and they were not that oppressed).
For those interested, Roger Agache [2] has done an excellent job of documenting the existence on the ground of those villas/manors based on aerial archeology. This page [3] does a good job at presenting some of Agache's work (including some photos), the French Ministry of Culture used to have a page dedicated to aerial archeology but, unfortunately, I now see that it has been taken down.
[1] https://www.seuil.com/ouvrage/histoire-de-la-france-rurale-c...
[2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Agache
[3] http://sehet.andre.free.fr/dedetextes/photosrogeragache.htm
(But I didn't come back to do more "Um, Achtually" about Feudalism. I found the links, now where should I put them?)
One of the core points is that "Feudalism" as used outside of academic discussion loses its semantic meaning beyond being a synonym for "oppressive". And so trying to discuss when feudalism starts inevitably falls into a discussion of "when did Europe get oppressive".
It wasn't until Charlemagne united most of Gaul and created the Frankish Kingdom that some semblance of peace was restored, ushering in the Middle Ages and the return of economic growth and cultural development.
As an aside, everything I read and was taught about the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, and the Renaissance back in my day was deeply intriguing and rich in wisdom and knowledge. It saddens me greatly if it's all been whitewashed down to "Dark Ages wrongspeak, Early Middle Ages rightspeak" and "Middle Ages backwards, Renaissance forwards" today because that is so grossly worthless.
It isn't used by modern historians because that concept and the light-vs-dark dichotomy isn't useful, as a historical practice. The idea that all local order collapsed with the roman empire is simply mythology, anachronistic veneration of a hierarchical system of power.
The romans were at least as violent as anything that came after. The idea that they provided unique stability in exchange for that violence is the roman justification for it. Vestigial propaganda from 2000 years ago. We are not obligated to accept it and in fact modern historians typically do not.
The facts of history may not change, but our understanding of it develops like any other academic discipline. Maybe don't reject a generation's worth of development in a complex field because your surface-level appraisal makes you sad.
> Do not say, “Why is it that the former days were better than these?” For it is not from wisdom that you ask about this.
Did they not reduce the amount of fighting? Was Pax Romana a myth? There would be less fighting between regions since most of the regions are already under the control of the regional superpower. Those that haven't been annexed would be wise to conserve their strength if they wish to maintain their independence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
It's named the Dark Ages because 11th century scholars wanted to feel like their time period was enlightened and great compared to the past, not because there was some deep, thoughtful analysis.
It always is alarming how often you see people say "smart people don't say X anymore, smart people say Y now," and a large segment of people jumps on board without any critical thought. It's not that criticism of the term is entirely without merit, but such criticism could be applied to all simplistic labels for historical epochs. Yet you don't see people take such issue with terms like "Bronze Age Collapse," because these comments aren't coming from a consistent intellectual framework, but rather from people mindlessly repeating a shibboleth.
And because medievalists are personally invested in pushing the relativist notion that the early medieval period was just as sophisticated as the Roman Empire that preceded it.
Roughly the area of the Dark Ages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period#/media/File:I...
If anything, the area of the Dark Ages looks to be larger than that of the Bronze Age Collapse. But either way, they're both referring to events that happened within a specific geographic area.
I don’t think I agree it’s a dominant issue for Twitter either, although Elon has attempted to frame it as such.
Reddit spent the last few years badgering mods into "combating misinformation". A war against an 'enemy' is an 'easy' way to get people in line.
For example, the science sub banned people for linking an official EU recommendation against more than 4 vaccines, or for questioning the natural origin theory. That's not science; it's antithetical to science.
Repeat this at scale, over millions of users, tens of thousands of subs, thousands of links, hundreds of concepts, over years; all powered and amplified by LLM powered bots and shadowy PR teams.
Complicit mods, those who didn't give much of a toss about free speech or independent thought, were selected for and elevated during this process.
Meanwhile, users and moderators who didn't like the idea of censoring alternate and legitimate viewpoints have been leaving / shadowbanned / marginalized for the past couple years.
Would the resistance of Reddit users and mods have been stronger without the above circumstances? I think it actually made a huge difference.
Reddit today is far worse than Reddit 4 years ago. Reddit tomorrow will be exponentially worse again, I have no doubt. The Corona "misinformation war" has been a large factor in that.
Think of it like a seismograph [0]. A violent swing in one direction is proceeded by a violent swing in the other direction. We’re living through the big swings right now.
I think it’s reductive to blame a single person. The people at the top are usually vessels for the people’s energy anyways. That’s why running these institutions is so hard, because you constantly feel powerless even though you’re responsible for making all the decisions.
We should find ways to settle each other, and I think that starts with setting ourselves and those close to us like our family and friends.
The world is a bit shaky!
[0] https://www.mtu.edu/geo/community/seismology/learn/seismolog...
For example there was a tangible consumable result of sharecropping - food that you eat. Youtube is the same sharecropping system, you get a small percentage of the product you produce (advertising revenue) for the organization (YouTube) who provide the property that you use.
For a feudalism - Reddit comparison, where is the economic compensation? Answer: there isn’t any that is facilitated by the platform.
So this can’t be compared as it’s a different economic system. I’ve heard it argued that some moderators are getting paid or whatever but I’ve seen no evidence of this and as a moderator and founder of 100,000 person Sub, that is very popular fora small community, at no point have we been approached as the moderator team by Reddit or otherwise, to be compensated for our work. Reddit uses 100% volunteer work and the entirety of the Reddit content moderation structure is Volunteer on top of a strict corporate hierarchy. I’m not actually sure we have a name for that in political theory (anyone have any ideas?)
I appreciate the differentiation here - even if there’s limited expected application for the layperson using the phrase colloquially in an Internet forum.
You earn karma by posting popular content. You can do that whether you are a mod or not.
(Well, in some cases a jealous mod might remove your posts, and then re-post them as their own. So if you are willing to abuse your mod position, then you can earn karma by leeching off your users.)
Besides why would I want “karma” or “Reddit gold?” Worthless pseudo-internet currency
you can crank out great posts in a 100k-1m user discussion sub all day and you'll never make anywhere near as much karma as popping into PCMR and doing "NVIDIA bad" "4060 too expensive" one-liner shitposts. 100x the karma for 0.1x the effort.
That was also when I stopped my subscription and the start of the downfall of reddit IMO. This started way before spez was CEO. I think it was Ellen Pao during her time of "making reddit profitable".
But I don't think reddit will ever be profitable. The value extraction on users and the big money interests are so counter to niche communities that made reddit what it was, that reddit will just kill itself over it.
I'm sure it will still exist in some form. But not as we know it (or have any kind of use for). Similar to how predecessor https://digg.com still exists but is just around to serve no one.
I am insufficiently familiar with the feudalism metaphor to claim it doesn't break down, but on a cursory glance, it seems to hold up.
Or are they naive chumps with too much time on their hands, tricked into doing free labour for a big corporation that actively disdains them?
I always thought the people manipulating opinion on social media were using bot accounts, rather than moderator positions.
So the only possible result, because the assumption is that nobody does anything is that isn’t selfishly compensated, is that there MUST be a psychic - non-priced - selfish benefit to the user. That might be true but I’m not sure that you can use those interchangeably because the latter has no pricing mechanism.
Using an example to illustrate this, if Reddit it came to me and attempted to charge me to moderate my sub, I would say no. If they offered to pay me to moderate, I would also say no because that would come with an expectation, or some kind of SLA or otherwise that I am not prepared to give.
No, I actually think that there’s another organizational structure here that we’ve just not seen or have a name for. Namely it’s where volunteers provide labor for privately owned property, have some control over said property but receive zero of the excess economic value produced by the mix of property holder and labor.
Procedurally: 1. Reddit the organization fronts some amount of capital to provide the platform
2. Volunteers then stake claim to manage and curate limited sub-properties (sub reddits)
3. Reddit the organization sells advertisement placement within the volunteer properties - completely separate from and without the collaboration with subreddit moderators
4. Reddit then keeps 100% of the advertising dollars and zero go to the moderators (or for that matter active members who arguably make the bulk of valuable contributions via content that drive revenue)
Contributions to “open source” that are not on publicly distributable licenses would fall into this category also.
Note here, I’m not using this particular point to complain about the structure - even though I believe it’s not a good structure. I’m simply pointing out that this is a structure that exists for which we don’t really have a coherent understanding of in my opinion
> Using an example to illustrate this, if Reddit it came to me and attempted to charge me to moderate my sub, I would say no. If they offered to pay me to moderate, I would also say no because that would come with an expectation, or some kind of SLA or otherwise that I am not prepared to give.
If Reddit came to you and tried to charge you to keep the subreddit running at all – as in, it'd be deleted from the web if the mods didn't pay – would that change the answer here? I have this suspicion that – for at least some smaller subs – it would.
And for bigger ones, I would guess mods might not... perhaps because they guess Reddit is already making enough ad money off their work for that exchange to seem unfair.
Only speaking for myself and not the rest of the mod team but I would still say no
If you think the average person that gets banned in a sub is some sort of freedom fighting martyr, then you frankly don't really know much about the subject.
> If you think the average person that gets banned in a sub is some sort of freedom fighting martyr,
I'm saying that average people get banned from subreddits all the time for completely innocuous remarks. Never getting banned isn't a badge of honor, all it shows is that you're skillful at never stepping on the toes of mods despite the capricious nature of reddit's moderation. That's nothing to be proud of.
I'm am saying my past 14 years on reddit do not confirm your statement.
Sure if you go to r/conservative and say something blue, you get insta-banned, because they do indeed hate free speech there, but this type of situation is the vast majority of "innocuous remarks getting somebody banned" : not understanding the subreddit.
> Never getting banned isn't a badge of honor
I'm not sure why you keep bringing this up, because nobody said it was, a straw man.
> I'm not sure why you keep bringing this up, because nobody said it was
I bring this up because I am responding to your attempt to shame Aleklart, with the implication that he did something worthy of getting himself banned:
> Your post really comes off as if you are sore about being banned from some sub.
Suppose he did get banned, does that imply he did something to deserve getting banned? No. Because reddit bans are frequently capricious. And if he was banned for no good reason, is it shameful that he was banned? No. And if you never get banned for capricious reasons, is that meritorious? Also, no. Quite the contrary in fact.
I've had multiple accounts I've been using for years with hundreds of posts/comments and as far as I know I've never been banned anywhere, and it's not like I haven't gotten into arguments or put forward opinions. I've had posts deleted, but always because I hadn't formatted it properly or followed some rule, but even that didn't lead to a ban.
I'm not unaware that there are other subreddits with more controversial stuff, but this sort of comment just feels like people claiming that everyone else is a sheep if they haven't been kicked out of a grocery store or a public park. I'm really curious what percentage of reddit's MAUs are folks who are experiencing which sort of subreddits mostly.
The effectiveness of proper moderation is what largely keeps it from catching your attention.
I certainly believe it happens, but the times I've heard it come up was generally because of brigading and harassment from one subreddit towards another, which certainly sweeps up some folks who just happened to be posting on both, but feels reasonable enough, situation depending.
Can you provide a falsifiable hypothesis and data that would point to support?
So the hypothesis would be something like: For the population of Reddit moderators, over 50% percent are primarily incentivized by dictatorial ego actions rather than community support actions as measured by evaluating the following moderation actions (ban, delete etc), over the time period 2007-2023.
Can you provide that?
Let's not act like Reddit itself hasn't been extremely valuable to these communities. It's just untrue that the mods do the only important work to build subreddits.
A lot of subs I'm in have low touch mods and I'm fairly sure if they didn't do it someone else easily would have. Hasn't dropped them from thinking they had fiat power and rights to shut down the subreddit despite many active users wishing to continue using Reddit.
it turns out, the communities and their members (mod and non-mod) are more valuable to reddit than vice versa
without reddit, the communities could exist on any other forum software, hosting paid by anyone else, and be the same
without the communities, reddit is worthless
So what do you call that economic system in which individual people volunteer to improve privately owned property and the only “compensation” is simply the opportunity to use/improve private property.
And again, unlike sharecropping, volunteers get zero of the property as fiat to convert.
Preemptively there’s no possible pathway to claim that Reddit is a “Public Commons”, because nobody but the legal owners and their designated controllers, determine the distribution of value or future of the property.
Mods can Just Quit. They can go self-host. Nobody is making them use Reddit. This isn't a labor situation where anyone's livelihood is at stake.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36562292
And yet, I still basically can't watch ANY DAMN VIDEO on the site now that I can't use 3P clients, yes, years after it's introduction the video player is still worse than stepping in dog shit.
It's a database, some over engineered piles of JS to load a list of links, and by reddits own messaging, a crap API. It's really not special. The mods and users made it what it is, in spite of what it is.
> Reddit then that anyone can create a subreddit on. It'll probably be better, right?
I've never had a topic like reddit get people so eager to shove words in my mouth. REDDIT GOT LUCKY and maybe were calculating it how they used free labor. They didn't make anything, they have no unique value prop after losing power users and moderators.
And despite what some funny people here say, the frontpage is a laughingstock still. When I peek once a week, because yes, I actually have some self-wilp and self-determination and feel no need to prop up shitty little platforms run by shitty lying little dictators. I know, shocking that some of us have values, and we even live them.
Instead of creating more strawmans to put in my mouth, why not actually rise to the discussion and tell me what reddit has that no one else can touch. I think you've conceded it's not tech.
To act like Reddit-the-product is valueless and did nothing right to get to where it is today is just silly.
The one angle I can see is selling access and priority on the sub externally. It’s clearly against the terms of service, but if done within the parameters of the sub it blends in fairly easily.
A good analogy is the private tax collectors in old Europe. The right to collect taxes would be sold to a private individual. In this case, the mods would be paying with their time to manage the rest of the sub and Reddit would turn a blind eye to paid mod abuse.
Just as in feudalism, you see the crown trying to govern by dividing the people and making them focus on survival so that the crown’s taxes flow and they dare not challenge local landowner.
I think the reason people balk at this is because in the case of physical property, you’re talking about literally life and death. It’s hard to make similar comparisons with text on computer screens.
So irrespective of whether or not structurally it makes sense, people I think are fighting with the comparison because the stakes are so different
The king wants the kingdom to run smoothly, and the baron makes that happen. If they do a shitty job they can be removed. On the other hand most barons won't want to let things get to that point, because it's still way better than being an actual serf (assuming they're not punished/executed).
And yes, many mods do derive personal satisfaction and power and influence (banning people they find particularly disagreeable, or particularly skilled at calling out a particular bit of bullshit the mod wants to push) in their work.
I've experienced the "you're banned on a random comment for no explanation, and if you modmail and ask why you're modmuted for a month instantly with no reply" personally as well, in a large discussion sub, over something completely innocuous.
You can control political conversation, you can control criticism of products and companies, you can pump up stocks, you can encourage the spread of useful rumors within industries, etc...
There are people paid full time to manipulate Reddit (and other networks.) The people and states employing them must be fools to waste so much money for no economic reward.
edit: this is aside from the people just trying to feel powerful, who will obviously be everywhere. It's hard, unpaid work. People doing it will tend to either be very strange or being paid from some other source. No different than Wikipedia, honestly.
This is a strawman.
Of course there are people paid to influence every single public opinion website from Twitter to Hacker News. That is a completely separate question as to what the economic incentives of moderators are.
The only way that makes sense is if you are making the claim that the plurality of moderators, or at least some exceptionally high percentage, are paid or otherwise compensated by somebody else to manipulate their subreddits.
There is no data to indicate that this is a widespread coordinated or otherwise repeatable business practice such that we could say that it is an economic system, comparable to other economic systems.
For generic subreddits, they can censor submissions & posts about certain products, while looking the other way at brigaded posts related to some other product. I dont even mention the most blantant things like stickying some topic.
This was made to eleven on all those crypto subreddits where there was tons of drama for mods pushing a certain crypto, or point of view, while ignoring other (e.g. drama between /r/bitcoin and /r/btc).
In gaming subreddits mods often get the chance to fly to some event hosted by the company that makes the game, or get in game things. So they arent "paid", but they certainly "listen" to the company (if they dont listen, they wont get a plane ticket and a hotel room + other "benefits).
Not to mention power mods, that are hungry for power and trade spots to moderater. There was that person who "moderated" 300 subreddits by trading spots and they could ban you from those 300 subreddits. Imagine that person got bribed to ban you? The new rage is trading spots by sock-puppet accounts, so it is not so visible.
The worst is, that we could easilly make a "better reddit" with multiple solutions: public and semi public subreddits, where users can vote on rules and vote on mods, public mod queue, super-mods reviewing it, users reviewing it and finally admins reviewing it. To have multiple methods to constantly chase for cliques (wikipedia in theory has it, but it's a complete parody - if 2 admins defend each other an user cannot do anything + admins selectively enforce rules: they use them on you, but not their own -> again this could be solved with anonymization of posts for review). Also to make it work it would have to have reviws by admins to ban brigaders (old style attacks with sock puppets blocking or allowing everything - like upvotes/downvotes worth 0).
I dont understand why apart from HN, there isnt any rich person who makes a board the way 'it should be'. Users would pay money for decent discussion.
YouTube is not the same as Reddit. A YouTube creator benefits from the platform and is paid for performance. It more like a record label type model. Reddit is different - as you said, moderators get no economic benefit. They just are the petty kings of a message board, and do a bunch of work for the company for free.
Reddit’s problem is there has never been a moat or a business. Their api made it easy for google to index them and gave them outsized influence. But they got too much investment and always had an ineffective team incapable of developing a coherent strategy to deliver the returns required to the investors. Examples are everywhere… old.reddit.com should not exist. If IPO was the path, it shouldn’t be a huge porn platform.
Perhaps this is a fundamental flaw with the platform. I see no reason why the people hosting and curating the communities shouldn't have a share of the money generated from them.
I've been working on a platform called Sociables to help address this problem. On the platform, people who create and run the communties have optional means of renumeration baked into the platform such as offering monthly membership plans, selling "awards" that can be assigned to comments and posts, donations, and more.
While it's not a fit for every type of community, I think aligning the incentives of the platform provider with the sources of where the the value is created (the communities) is crucial for fostering a healthy environment and avoiding this situation where the platform goes to war against itself.
https://sociables.com/community/Sociables/home
"Useful idiots"?
You're doing useful work, creating a community, for free. But if you analyze that in political or economic terms, you're doing work for free that enhances the wealth and/or power of someone else. So if politics or economics is your framework, then the phrase I quoted might fit.
If the class difference is big, the narrative to justify the difference must be strong; even under serfdom or slavery, there were uprisings when the narrative was weak. The lowest class has to be (to some degree) content with their situation.
And now you are making a gross mischaracterisation of nirvana. It is nothing like Heaven (Buddhism has heavens and hells too, or higher and lower planes of existence). And no, nirvana does not 'serve the same purpose as a god'.
This is like half the startups since 2000's, like Amazon warehouse workers and Deliveroo.
Just instead of physical land, their holding are IP, but equally violently protected by the state.
Feudalism lasted for thousands of years, it should be surprising to see bits of it re-emerge
* AKA "Steve Antoinette"
** Yes, Antoinette was, really, particularly unfairly maligned and the enduring "PR failure" around her is a more complex and "apocryphal" case-study - but, whether understood this way or in the common vernacular sense, the point holds. See, e.g. and as a starting point: https://guides.loc.gov/women-in-the-french-revolution/marie-...
I dont think reddit is doomed, they just need to reign in the moderators and their ban lists, and enable some competition between subreddits (right now it's almost impossible to find alternative subs even if with search)
He doesn’t side with Steve or find Steve’s statement to be historically informed, but there are some similarities (and differences) to note if you compare moderators to lords and Reddit/Steve to a king.
The article basically says "let's play along and say Reddit is like feudalism - then what comes next is early Modern Governments" ie - centralization of power towards absolute centers of power. The article argues that Reddit currently employs moderators because the heterogeneity (ie, strong distinctions of subreddits) are not generally amendable to local control. In order for Reddit to transition to strong centralization that heterogeneity needs to be reduced and managed (in a form similar to how TikTok serves up content in a way that minimizes the ability of 'communities' with heterogeneous norms to form).
What does it make owners of platforms who decide with more or less absolute authority what is acceptable on their platforms?
As software platforms 'eat the world?'
<cough>Elon "The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters."</cough> https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/elon-musk-woke-mind-virus/
Subreddits where the moderators often behave against the overall wishes of the community usually don't end well.
over moderation is just as bad too. the best moderation is human, engaged, and flexible.
you are doing it wrong.
You 'curate' in favor of your advertisers. /r/eatcheapandhealthy has some relationship with Leanne Brown. They let that website's marketers astroturf + they link on the sidebar.
On the bright side, HN doesn't hide that they have perverse incentives, they just pretend that astroturfing doesnt exist.
This is why I laugh when people say they include site:reddit.com in their web searches for product reviews. You may as well read amazon reviews; what you're seeing is very likely curated by somebody with a commercial interest in the thing.
> But it doesn't look like reddit is benefiting from any of this. Contrast this to facebook, which has managed to squeeze money from advertisers under a somewhat similar setting.
This has always been reddit's biggest problem; it's cheaper and more effective to astroturf or buy moderators than to buy ads from reddit. Companies that buy ads from reddit are chumps, they should be taking over subreddits instead. The rate of return is far superior.
when SEO became gamed and the signal filtering was transferred to reddit, it became inevitable that eventually Reddit Optimization would occur for commerce as well.
It's like trying to stomp down on sneakerheads scalping sneakers/GPUs/etc, or fighting hackers in an online game - you have to treat it as a process, not a victory that can be won with a single move, because everytime you make a move they're going to come up with a new strategy to get around it. What matters is that you keep coming up with counterstrategies for those.
The space seems ready for a model that pays everyone in the pipeline their true micro share of add and subscription revenue of what they contribute. I can't understand why something that does this hasn't taken over this space yet.
There's crude versions of this with 'Karma', YouTube and twitch streaming revenue, substack, medium, brave rewards and so on. But nothing that just automatically works without sign up and a lot of friction.
Nobody cares about being paid for content when they're all willing to do it for free. When I post on reddit, I'm not doing it for compensation, but for upvotes. Reddit is just another mini-Google.
What we need is a model that is redditesque but not VC funded. Just a small team maintaining something on the lines of old.reddit.com.
And maybe a paid app like Apollo.
the problem is that reddit's scale provides value too. those alternatives exist, but nobody wants to post on them because a subreddit/forum with <5 regular commenters is boring and valueless. and the scale provides an endless stream of eyeballs, and low friction of clicking between subs and commenting on a new thing you haven't before (cf: the burden of figuring out 27 different lemmy instances).
in terms of evolutionary advantage, going big is what keeps subs alive, and it's what keeps platforms alive. Someone who is willing to pay to start a centralized reddit 2.0 and establish the definitive r/vacuumcleaners is going to have a market advantage over 30 small lemmy nodes all trying to discuss vacuum cleaners. Especially in anything remotely niche - yeah everyone is discussing video games and politics, but, the really niche hobby interests don't have the user count to survive a 99.9% loss in users.
another related problem is moderation policies: reddit provides a "one size fits all" moderation policy and then allows communities to go tighter, based on the whims of mods. But in the fediverse model, a lot of pods just won't federate with places that have different moderation policies.
There just is a ton of that administrative superstructure that reddit provides that actually adds a lot of value too. And that has been the problem with a lot of the discourse around leaving reddit: the exact reasons Mastodon and Lemmy are having trouble getting traction are the value that Reddit provides in the relationship. People can't solve the problems they can't acknowledge.
And then the mods pretty much pay lip service to user-generated value but then either ignore it or use it as a pawn (going against community votes to reopen, not allowing reopen as an option in the vote, etc) that makes it pretty clear they think they're the real value-add and that reddit would collapse without the dashing handsome moderator who spends 10 minutes scrolling the mod queue while squeezing the lemon on the shitter a couple times a day.
Reddit did not lose money because of the core platform, ie old.reddit.com. Reddit lost money wasting on a number of initiatives like 1.) the mobile app 2.) shitty ad platform. Instagram advertises to me about the next hot restaurant near me, or some small business making a cool Trinket. Google does not get my eyeballs because of adblockers. Reddit serves me ads telling me how IBM is the hottest technology consulting shit in town, when I'm just looking for army compositions for Age of Empires 2.
YouTube was much better the time there was no revenue share. If they were to one day switch off the revenue spigot (like they seem to be on track to do currently), the creators will still stay. You think MrBeast will leave the platform that gives him access to the eyeballs? He'll just have to find (and find he will) another way to earn his butter.
this implies that you don't already need to aggressively tailor your feed (and especially users) to get a sane experience. I'm already digging through 90% muck, not much will change there (or, was. Long since quit reddit specifically outside of very specific communities I haven't found replacements for).
>You think MrBeast will leave the platform that gives him access to the eyeballs?
There's 3 base levels of content creator here to consider:
- small time ones not monetized or barely monetized (under 10k subs or so). These are the ones who probably could make more mowing lawns, let alone minimum wage. This category will have a fluxuation of those who stay because they care more about the clout and/or the content, and those who wanted to one day make a livinig wage on this. Any other who stay and want to be successful would be playing extremely hard to the algorithm, moreso than they already are. They'd fizzle out otherwise.
- Then there's the ones with the hugest range (~100k-2m subs or so) who are anywhere from "this is a good part time gig" to "this is my full time career with a small to medium sized team contributing". This category would be absolutely decimated by the impact. The larger side may have to dowsize and/or reduce the content stream, likely rely much heavier on ad sponsors, and otherwise compromise their content. The smaller side would just fizzle out, full stop. large but not quite large enough to get more ad deals, likely a solo channel with at best 1-2 editors/help on the side. They cannot live off of youtube any longer.
This is where 95% of my feed comes from and it would only make my experience worse.
- Then ofc there's the massive 10m+ subs, the MrBeasts of the world. They are so massive and have so many pools of revenue to draw from (sponsors, merch, "native ads" where they just make a video about a company under the company's dime, crowdfunding sites, commisions, other social media, etc.). Many of these are efectively millionaires and can stop anytime they want. They won't be as strongly affected, maybe have some layoffs and slight slowdown of content. But it's losing 1 of a dozen different ways they make money; unfortunate but not gamebreaking.
This effectively turns Youtube into a place either of pure passion or top level coporations in all but name. I don't see this as a better time. Maybe pre-Google Youtube was a magical place, but there's no closing Pandora's box to return to those times.
To call it bare bones is an understatement, but I do wonder how it or potential other similar sites may work in this modern era. Will people who truly want quality content and discussion put their money where their mouths are? Only time will tell.
Reddit will eventually find new mods to replace the ones still protesting, and business will continue as usual. After all, there's no shortage of people who want to lord over others. Moderation isn't some highly skilled activity that requires special qualifications.
Neither is cleaning up a beach. You may even get some willing to clean a small part, but having a few people spend exorbitant amounts of time cleaning a beach everyday that is also infested with sharks and crabs starts to turn a simple problem to a specialized one.
I see this argument all the time, but isn't this just human nature? In any organized structure, some people are going to seek out "power" and abuse it. You will find people making the same complaint about their neighbor who is the head of the homeowner association. It's also part of why people become cops, or if they can't get there, security guards.
Every broad "type" of community on the internet has had this problem. I remember growing up, there were plenty of capricious IRC moderators and admins as well as moderators of individual forums. Little dictators.
I will say, I feel like there was a concerted effort to frame these API changes as specifically being harmful to those with disabilities and moderators (I guess in an attempt to point to short term, immediate concrete harms that would come from this), which opened things up to reframing the whole discussion around as a referendum on moderation.
And apparently most people can't make a simple connection and ask "Why did Reddit not care about these flagrant power abuses before? Will they keep caring after this is over?"
And it seems like that's been fairly successful. But I still think Reddit has doomed itself with this move.
It's funny lore and it lead to the site having culture of a sort, but it points to a failure in upper-level administration. Reddit simply doesn't care about the product it's putting out, beyond some very basic rules aimed at trying to prevent the site itself from being sued, and it shows.
I tried to "play the tape through" on this, and imagine what it looks like. If Reddit had proactively tried to implement some kind of intervention system to remove abusive moderators from subreddits.
It puts Reddit as an organization in a tough position, because they have to mediate disputes. And it opens up a bunch of other questions. How big does a subreddit have to be before they qualify for this intervention system? Does one submit an organized case like filing a lawsuit? What if the accused moderator is the only moderator of the subreddit?
And what new rules does Reddit add to try to curb abusive moderators? There'd have to be some kind of ethical guidelines drawn up. So now unpaid moderators can be disbarred like lawyers?
Every thing I think of (admittedly not having spent a ton of time thinking about this) is open to potential abuse. Even if you set the trigger to be a 90% vote of "no confidence" by subscribed members of the subreddit, the subreddit would be vulnerable to "raids". If you gate it to "you have to have been subscribed for X amount of time" the time will either be too short and leave raiding or create a new "class" of "landed gentry" that have a disproportionate say in how the subreddit is run.
So I don't know if it's actually a failure. Some of the stuff Reddit did early on, things like vote fuzzing etc... show a willingness to experiment with using the platform itself to enforce better behavior. They might have been able to figure something out, eventually. But then I think of really simple stuff that even Hacker News has implemented (ex. you can't downvote a direct reply to one of your comments) and how Reddit doesn't have that.
Reddit does not want to control its moderators in any way. Because of that, they dont even have any willingness to try to make the mods more accountable.
Yes. It's not easy.
But Reddit knowingly went into a community moderated forum industry. It's not as if this situation was forced on them. Having some plans for this would have been normal business planning.
A lot of this sounds like the plan was:
1. Cool website
2. ?????
3. Profit!!!
Except they never got to 3 and now are scrambling.
What I am arguing is that Reddit did have an established doctrine around subreddits. That doctrine was to give as much autonomy (and free speech) as possible to people who create subreddits. And that was intentional, not a result of lack of planning.
Until now, this has been backed up by their actions over a long timespan. There were many subreddits that Reddit allowed to exist that are almost inconceivable today and only banned after enduring long campaigns of immense public pressure. When they did ban them they changed site guidelines to reflect new rules.
I think overall, the additional content guidelines that were hammered out through this process are fair. I think content guidelines that ban content that may not be illegal but are harmful makes sense. Things like "No non consensual pornography" (aka revenge porn) and "No advocating violence towards groups of people" (no organized racism) are very reasonable.
But it also allowed for subreddits to be created that Reddit as an organization would never have thought of or been able to nourish to a point they became very large. I really think that's what Reddit's secret sauce is and has been.
Gigantic subreddits like r/IAmA, r/todayilearned, r/wholesomememes came from users and grew organically. Yes, this approach has had downsides such as the emergence of powermods and the creation of bad subreddits like r/jailbait and r/fatpeoplehate.
Because of the numerous issues I outlined above, I'm not sure Reddit would have been successfully able to implement or outline a process for keeping the magic of subreddits and a fair system that scales for removing mods and they had no incentive to try. They're going to have to try now though, because I don't think there is any coming back from this.
Does it need to? Reddit doesn't care about the local squabbles, and misleading sub names or bare minimum moderation aren't against their rules. it cares about ad revenue. So while it feels hypocritical to suddenly care about maliciously compliant mods, it's consistent in their goals.
I do agree that even if they don't care, they should fit in SOME ability to hoist a mod by some mixture of the community other mods who disagree but simply weren't there first.
I worked at a fairly popular social media site about a decade ago and paid content moderation farms were a dime a dozen, I can’t even imagine what it’s like now.
If the mods are still gone at that point, there's abandoned-subreddit procedures that will be executed.
And that's the part that mods are trying to exploit for griefing with the "it's not closed, we're just not letting anyone post"/"we're only letting people post unfunny memes in protest"/etc. I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you.
Like it's just kind of funny that the mods are literally Going Galt and just like would happen in the real world, they're panicking with the realization that the world is pretty much going to move on without them.
lolololololol, god i wish reddit would. that would be such an incredible fire.
The main point of contention would be on subs where the user base is divided in it's moderation desires, e.g., san francisco crime posts. Half the users think the city is just fine and the crime posts make them angry, the other half think the city is falling apart, and therefore think the issues is entirely relevant. In this type of situation, the obvious solution is to split the sub like Seattle/SeattleWA did, but both sides want control over the sub.
These cultural control subs are the only ones that I think would "fall apart" without moderation, and even then I think the users would eventually self-select for separate subs.
This whole issue has been bizarre, and I definitely did not have the passion about it that some mods do. Still, I think I'm growing weary of moderating, but I think it's mainly that I'm getting old.
I’m still able to use the site with minimal bullshit, but I see the wave coming.
The mods for those big subs are literally untouchable and can do whatever they want, with no accountability.
If mods are landed gentry then spez is a monarch. Unelected, unaccountable to the populace and completely out of touch with their concerns (even more so than the "landed gentry").
Even if they do, it may not matter. One is doing immediate, local damage and you'll probably never be in a state to singlehandedly usurp Trump (ignoring for a fact that crow eating is imminent).better to deal with the local problem even if we could objectively agree that Trump has done more damage to a society.
But it makes me dislike Steve Huffman all the more when he only brings up the issue of out of control mods when they're doing a protest over a legitimate grievance.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36363741>
It's just like being a commissioned military officer, you serve at the pleasure of the President and if you end up being a shitter you're gone and they'll replace you with someone else. Nobility was literally medieval commissions.
> And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.
which is:
> While I am willing to get hype about the general idea of property inheritance being so anti-democratic in nature that a democratic society must expropriate that property to function, I am guessing Steve Huffman, estimated net worth in the millions Steve Huffman, is not too married to what that implies, and really intends only to speak of inherited authority.
- [0] https://www.scottgoci.com/killing-the-king-why-do-communitie...
- [1] https://www.scottgoci.com/from-pioneers-to-landed-gentry-exp...
This feeds into point two. Most people don't want to play moderator and create huge lists of filters in order to not deal with shit. They will gladly farm that off to someone else even if there are considerable potential negative side effects, and if it gets too bad they will pack up and move to a new community with less negative effects.
Sure — but think of Ad block filters. Filter lists eventually get developed (eg Easylist), and if the maintainers ever do something radical, users can easily remove one filter list and substitute another.
It’s much harder for users in communities with moderators to do the same — if I get banned from /r/detroit and I live there, what’s my alternative?
If Reddit could just pay moderators that money, it seems to me to be an obviously good deal. But I mostly suspect the number is a pretty big underestimate and Reddit couldn’t just do that.
I’ve noticed the link to a member-only Medium article[1] that serves as a source for that estimate, but I have to ask—is that a vast amount? It doesn’t feel like a vast amount. It’s at most 30 first-world full-time employees (and even that is a huge stretch) or 4e-3 $/MAU/yr (per a 2021 estimate of 900M monthly active users I picked from search results at random). It feels too small to even pay for the maintenance of the third-party mod tools, let alone the actual (far more numerous) moderators.
Does this number seem plausible to anyone with actual domain knowledge?
[1] https://clivethompson.medium.com/reddit-moderators-do-over-3...
Here's the study with methodology and whatnot. I agree it seems a bit low
That's definitely not what companies have to pay to employ someone for, say, $30k/yr.
Multiply mananaysiempre's figure by three and the result remains surprisingly small. 90 paid moderators isn't much at all.
[1] "The Reddit moderators who coordinate many celebrity AMAs will no longer do so", https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/1/23781306/reddit-moderators...
Is anyone going to pay first-world wages for someone to moderate a subreddit? It doesn't seem like anyone is willing to do so, because the mods do it for free. Nobody is willing to pay for this service. Social media companies that do pay for moderators tend to pay them not well at all. It's not a great job. It burns people out. It is in fact entry-level no-experience-needed grunt work.
Your calculations are vastly over-inflated.
[1] Famous AMA, https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/adiidz/iama_reddits_o...
How would you even reach some of those people? I'm pretty sure some of them have very specialized domain knowledge and already have full time paid jobs. They aren't in it for the money.
Reddit risking throwing all that away is shows an absurd and extraordinary level of ignorance.
>I’ve noticed the link to a member-only Medium article that serves as a source for that estimate, but I have to ask—is that a vast amount? It doesn’t feel like a vast amount.
It is absolutely not a vast amount.
A single mod's actual worth is "$175K" per year <https://np.reddit.com/r/35orquit/comments/qw1v3e/what_do_peo...>, according to one mod.
(Be sure to read to the end, where he explains how he "saves lives".)
But it's the right way to go from his perspective. In retrospect subreddits were a mistake, allowing individual communities to form in isolation, requiring mods who understood the nuances of each of those communities.
/u/spez wants to figure out how to kill subreddits without actually killing them. My guess is that subreddits will transition over to a hashtag concept. At first, posts will only be allowed to have one hashtag (so it maps to how reddit works today), eventually they will have many. This will kill sub moderation.
All that's left is killing old.reddit.com, he can do that by just gimping the thing and breaking it. Nothing explicitly malicious but just stop putting engineering effort into it and eventually it falls apart. This makes sure all users use "new reddit".
In the new client you won't be able to view subreddits - you will have tag search but it will never be as feature rich as just scrolling the home page.
I have no idea if reddit can compete with tiktok but at this point that's where they'll be. Maybe they hitch on to the "tiktok is stealing your data" wagon and brand themselves as the American Tiktok that is Lawful and Is Not Evil, which can probably get them decently far.
Yeah, wikipedia is a non-profit and arguably provides a more universal value: so what?
Each model has pros and cons, for the org and for society. I'm not sure if one is always better than the other in any context.
But one thing is clear: the unpaid model invariably leads to an authority-centered model where power over other participants is the payment token. That's how it's been in wikipedia and reddit.
It seems in their new war, reddit want to wrestle that power back to them.