Who the hell is going to want to mod in that context?
1. Corporate marketing departments
2. Unpopular political/religious factions seeking to surreptitiously "move the needle"
3. Those who wanted to become mods before but didn't make the cut for completely valid reasons. Now they have an opportunity, only the quality will decrease as a result
How would that be different from the status quo?
The worst mods for the community will be the best mods for reddit's bottom line. The power-tripping is payment in itself for those types.
Will it though? Twitter's moderation policies have all but collapsed and the net result is a near-total flight of high-profile high-dollar advertisers.
Like others have mentioned in the thread, the people who will most likely want to take over these subs are going to be some combination of bigots, cranks, and the severely deranged. That doesn't seem like it will do good things for user participation or advertiser attractiveness.
Who wants to advertise on /r/movies if the mod team is exclusively made up of chemtrails connoisseurs and the main topic of discussion is what movies are secret plots by the Jewish cabal?
As if the current mods are any different?
Honestly I don't mind this at all. The big subreddits have become so ossified in their power structures, that each community is its' own little fiefdom now. There is massive friction to being able to post anywhere. Reddit would be objectively better with a less heavy handed approach to moderation, and some kind of site-wide formal appeals process that neuters the ability of any individual mod from going on a power trip.
Remember, "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People". <https://np.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_...>. This also applies to powermods, assuming they're not being paid on the side to push some ideology.
That's technically true, but that's because nobody today really thinks about Reddit AMAs, because there are fairly few of them and they're mostly lousy.
When they employed Victoria, AMAs were frequent and involved high-profile public figures engaging with the users in a way that, even if it was self-promotion, felt relatively genuine and was entertaining - This was because Victoria was essentially interviewing people with user-submitted questions, and she was good at it. The Reddit AMA was a cultural touchstone, like the late-night talk-show circuit.
Victoria herself was not somehow utterly irreplaceable, but as far as I can tell, they fired her and replaced her with nothing. With the result that Reddit lost a popular, interesting feature and a lot of cultural relevance.
I think it's very appropriate to compare that situation with the situation today, though perhaps not as you intended it; it won't burn down the site, Reddit will go on, but it will be a little worse and a little closer to that tipping point because of yet another bad management decision.
I actually can’t think of more than a handful of examples of great AMAs the last few years. At one point it was a press stop for almost anyone famous doing a tour, and that doesn’t seem to be true anymore.
I think the general consensus among Reddit is that AMA's were a lot higher quality back then.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/top/?t=all
I had to scroll for pages and pages to find one that was recent. The heyday appears to have been 5 to 9 years ago.
It looks like this sub got established as the place to go and then it slowly lost momentum over time.
I used to visit it often back when she was around, but I don't think I even remembered it exists anymore, until you happened to mention it. It just lost relevance.
Ultimately that protest went no where because there was no end game -- Victoria didn't want her job back. It was just done. End of era.
I can't say that that subreddit was better in the Victoria Taylor era than today because I don't visit it anymore. I also can't say I stopped visiting it because of the same event.
But I know at some point I stopped caring about the high profile threads and the answers they gave.
I suspect a lot of communities, especially the smaller ones, feel the same way.
It's psychologically unhealthy, any therapist would tell you that.
Current front page:
>A new study has found that both Christian nationalism and biblical literalism are associated with a greater tendency to believe in conspiracy theories
>Being female, liberal, intellectually humble, and having weak party identification are all positively associated with writing more persuasive political arguments
>When house prices increase, homeowners are likely to strengthen their belief in meritocracy
Mods that feel that strongly about protecting their community would do so much better in a federated context.
There are certainly those, but not sure it is accurate to generalize to mods as a whole.
Remember, "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People". <https://np.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_...>. This also applies to powermods, assuming they're not being paid on the side to push some ideology.
I was going more for "very hard, especially in bulk and on short notice" than irreplaceable there.
>wouldn’t it make more sense to protest by quitting?
Already did a while back...used to mod some big-ish subs.
Going private seems like a reasonable intermediate step though. A bit like workers holding a strike instead of straight to mass resignation
Competent - many I'm sure. Damn near anyone that has supervised people in just about any context is probably overqualified.
Competent and willing to put in hours of unpaid work dealing with crazy people and drama and bickering and spam deletion...less so.
The same type of people who want to be on the boards of HOA's. eg: the ones you least want doing it.
These sites need to ensure they deliver on numbers represented to paid advertisers, and now it's pretty much the only way to make it to top rankings, so how much one is willing to pay determines what's on the front page more than anything else now.
The corporate mods are the ones that prevent harmful and deceptive things from staying at the top of the front page I bet, and they're not likely to be regular mod roles any time soon due to the power wielded.
These massive social media sites all get corrupted after a while and then can never manage to come back. This may well be that point for Reddit.
There are surprisingly few mods for how much engagement the subreddits have. There has to be mods that are just as good as the current batch, but haven't had a chance to shine.
This of course assumes the selection process is built to identify and promote mods that are as good, or better than the old mods.
Question for HN: If you were the Reddit admins, how would run the moderator selection process to get a great crew?
I really hope a mass migration to lemmy instances really sticks.
Why do I need so many members to show up when search for servers? That means I need to have a community somewhere else.
Who would want to instantly have status over millions of people? Hmm, that's a hard one...
They are not asking a lot, just don't shut down the site in a hissy fit
People with vendettas and power vacuum opportunists
People that want a different narrative on a subreddit
There are tons of people that have other causes and interests than API tooling or company drama
You know, this is all quite ignorable
I think that's part of Reddit's problem - They can replace the mods with random people if they want, but the likelihood that those people will put in the work and do a good job is not high.
I made no such statement.
[1] Source: am responsible for trust and safety including the tech solution and the moderation team for a 1bil+ views site. [2] For example https://hivemoderation.com/ or https://www.openweb.com/
I'm not sure how you would properly prompted LLM change moderating standards based on community feedback? Sticky threads for popular topics? Have the understanding of things like local politics or a newly released game in 2023 to be able to separate out bad faith discussion from real? Reddit isn't twitter where the main thing the mods do is remove abusive replies. They're community crafters and maintainers.
When all this started I had no doubt that the protests would come, make their point, end, and then Reddit would continue on its way.
But this has been so poorly handled.
I think a key to reddit's "success" (such as it is) is that they figured out how to scale moderation -- by getting volunteers to do the tough work for free. I'm sure reddit can toss all the uncooperative mods and get as many new ones as they could ever want.
But they are changing the fundamental dynamic between mod, subreddit and reddit the company. I wonder if this won't actually break the system.
Before, mods could run subreddits as they saw fit, users could choose the subreddits they participated in, and a user can always create a new subreddit if they don't think any existing ones suit their needs.
Now mods will have to accept that supporting reddit's business goals is the "zeroth law" for any subreddit. I just wonder if enough quality moderators will be willing to put in the time and effort required to keep a larger community from devolving into a cess pool, or to build up new subreddits -- for free.
When you're working for yourself doing what you want, when you want, you don't mind not getting paid for it. When a boss is telling you want to do and when to do it, you expect to get paid. Reddit is making itself the boss of the mods.
The thing is, this is an entirely unforced error. Overwhelmingly, the natural interests of subreddits are aligned with Reddits business goals, or at least aren't in opposition to them. The horribly handled roll out of the API pricing has essentially backed mods into a corner, basically forcing them to protest and then extend the protest.
IDK, maybe this was all 4D chess, and reddit wanted to get rid of third party apps and have an excuse to purge moderators with a sense of ownership over the subreddits they moderate. But it sure seems to me like they just don't know what they are doing. I know reddit needs to figure out how to become sustainable (profitable), and changing the dynamic between reddit and third-party apps is likely a necessary part of that. But I can't believe disengaging moderators can possibly help.
As a frequent Reddit user I don't agree with that. The network effects of subreddits plus the fact that they usually own the default name for a topic grant a lot of subs effective monopolies.
As a user if I don't like something about a certain subreddit including how it's moderated, the more realistic option is just to not participate in that subject matter on Reddit. I can still use Reddit for other topics but I feel like there's very rarely an alternative subreddit on the same topic which is anywhere near as active as the main one.
So, no offense to Reddit mods, but I really don't think these are all highly skilled, irreplaceable individuals. There's no competition that incentivizes the best people to rise to the top, these are just average folks that volunteered at the right time and now they're mods. There is apparently even a lot of cronyism among the mod community and I have heard that it can be hard to break into for first time mods.
If Reddit forces some of them out, there will be many people willing to step in who can do just as good of a job. It might even be a net positive thing to get new people involved.
That's often the case, but not always. A bad mod can drive people to an alternate subs. And having the default name doesn't mean that a sub with an alternate name can't thrive. I enjoy r/marijuanaenthusiasts despite the fact that I've never smoked.
This is spot on. Reddit's success relies entirely on the intrinsic motivation of moderators. That intrinsic motivation in turn is derived from the feeling of building something of long-lasting value.
There is no instrinsic joy in wading through your mod queue and deleting spam and garbage. The work itself is deeply unfun.
The reward is feeling that if you do that work and do it consistently, then you will create a space where a community of people you care about can thrive.
Now Reddit is sending a clear signal that at any point in time, they can stomp all over your community and kick you out. If I was mod of any decent-sized Reddit, that would make no longer feel safe investing the time it takes to earn that intrinsic reward, when the reward could evaporate at any moment.
> the reward could evaporate at any moment
Wait a minute, is the reward the fact that the community exists? That's not going to evaporate overnight when Reddit replaces a mod.
The fear of your reward evaporating sounds a lot more like this work is driven by ego and the desire for control.
> If there are mods here who are willing to work towards reopening this community, we are willing to work with you to process a Top Mod Removal request or reorder the mod team to achieve this goal if mods higher up the list are hindering reopening. We would handle this request and any retaliation attempts here in this modmail chain immediately.
> Our goal is to work with the existing mod team to find a path forward and make sure your subreddit is made available for the community which makes its home here. If you are not able or willing to reopen and maintain the community, please let us know.
I will bet Reddit will be just fine.
I may not be an expert in French law, yet an analogy that comes to mind would be envisioning workers of a grocery store who've decided to go on strike. But rather than merely expressing their refusal to work, they also opt to seal the store's doors, blocking customers from entering.
Of course, customers might find the current situation unfavorable due to the absence of employees (think of barren shelves, paralleling communities overpopulated with off-topic discussions). Management, too, would likely find the situation objectionable due to a lack of employees to ensure transactions are being made legally (equivalent to the absence of moderators who uphold site rules, a scenario potentially hazardous to Reddit). Even though management might be compelled to shut down the store under these circumstances, it's essential to remember that closure remains a management prerogative, not a decision for the striking workers.
I mean, here you are just describing the mods that are holding these subreddits hostage. It seems appropriate for reddit to return these to the community in the case where the obsessed power hungry mod's behavior goes against what the community wants.
If you can turn all of the subreddits into tens of thousands of problem children for Reddit that they can’t fix with automation, they will be unable to cope.
One of the things I have noticed is that the boycott is not from the users but from the mods of the community. Even if the community had a vote, if you want to boycott fine but they are forcing others to go along with with them.
So either they are not the majority or they feel that the community has such little willpower to continue the boycott that they must force them to take part.
Ask yourself, who told you that was true? The strikers? Or the guy with the vested interest in breaking the strike and desperate to find anyone -- literally anyone -- to cross the line?
Not gonna lie, if reddit strips our moderation, once the automod rules get figured out by the spammers, the value that particular subreddit will collapse into trash and spam.
so, sure, aim that footgun and start pulling the trigger... go on then.
I have no idea why someone would put the time required into moderating a large sub for no money just for Reddit’s benefit in the first place. A Reddit model where the mods share in profits (kind of how YouTube creators do) would be interesting.
But if you’re going to sign up for that, you can’t expect Reddit to just let you tank their site. It was never yours.
I’d do the same thing if I were Reddit, though I guess I’d also not be in this situation if I were them either because I’d just price the API reasonably.
It could all go super well and everyone forgets about this shakeup, or it could engender further animosity and chase people (particularly trend-setting power users) to some other platform. It could also ruin some communities if the wrong new mods are chosen.
I’m not sure how likely this is but it is plausible.
The other alternative is for Reddit to just stand by and let the blackouts chase people away indefinitely. It is hard to imagine that is better. It will upset the people who have already decided to leave Reddit anyway, but for most of the people who just want to see funny GIFs, it will be better.
Reddit owns Reddit, no? They have the right to do whatever they want with their website.
Community is a bit like a butterfly. Try to grip it too tightly and you no longer have a butterfly just mush
Reddit can do whatever they want with their site but they can't force users to do anything.
feeling of power and purpose?
Remember, "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People". <https://np.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_...>. This also applies to powermods, assuming they're not being paid on the side to push some ideology.
Then there's a lot of negative reasons to join. For power, to gain a sphere of influence, possible to sell this as a product.
I view a subreddit as a composite of three parts: The authors, the curators, and the host.
Reddit, Inc. owns only one of those three, and it's arguably the one that's most easily replaced.
To large extent, the authors are only authors because the sub is on Reddit. They have the network effect that brings the other two. That’s very hard to replace. You could easily find another person to make up dumb rules and arbitrarily enforce them, which is what they’re doing and we’re discussing. They will succeed.
In what way would it be interesting?
There would, of course, be some downsides too.
On the other hand, if it's what they're going to do, then that's how it is. You can't really expect them to just leave a namespace like, say, /r/politics in the hands of someone who openly says they aren't going to use it. So of course they're going to remove mods who stick to a blackout, what else could they do? At the end of the day it's their site and everyone's free to leave if they don't like how it's run. This was always the problem with making a home on Reddit, some of us have been saying so all along.
(PS: Please understand that Discord is going to have a moment like this. Maybe in two years, maybe in five, but it'll happen. It is inevitable.)
Closing it IS using it, in a very public and visible way. They just don't like HOW it is used by the people who built it.
I assure you, there is a line around the block of people clamoring to become mods. There's a reason its nigh impossible to become a mod of a big sub, the people that are doing it really like doing it and dont want more people joining to dilute their share of the power.
If moderators were inconsequential Reddit wouldn't be trying to hire and fire them.
>I assure you, there is a line around the block of people clamoring to become mods.
The willingness of others to do the same work doesn't make what someone does inconsequential. Would you say an NBA player is inconsequential because you could find a million people who would like to play in the NBA? Obviously being a Redditor moderator and being an NBA player are two different things but by how you are valuing based on willingness to replace, an NBA player would be more inconsequential than a Reddit moderator.
The subreddit model seems to me to work as a combination of moderators setting and enforcing some rules, users submitting content (hopefully good) and users upvoting and commenting on content.
If the mods are wrong on all of this, then the users who voted to blackout either weren't contributing much or will back down and things will go back to business as usual. But it's also possible that replacing the mods will just lead to many of the users who voted to blackout taking further action. A subreddit without content or with protesting users posting spam isn't fixed by adding more mods.
Frankly, I don't see this happening, at least not without significant pain. Not to mention the ill will that is continuing to build, which will only compound the difficulty of getting new volunteers on board.
The important thing to note – even though you join a particular Lemmy "instance", it doesn't particularly matter which one, because you can subscribe to communities (subreddits) from any instance.
The instance I joined – vlemmy.net
An aggregator of communities to join – https://lemmyverse.net/communities
https://www.jayeless.net/2023/06/on-reddit-and-alternatives....
What's interesting is that Reddit isn't really a single community - Each individual subreddit has it's own moderators, editorial voice, group of people, etc. They can each move independently.
For example, /r/startrek and the related startrek websites have all moved to https://startrek.website
This federates with Lemmy, kbin, etc - So if a user posts to startrek.website it shows up everyone else's servers, and people can reply from whatever federated site they use
I've been building a platform called Sociables which is intentionally not just a Reddit clone. We are trying to create an all-in-one place for people to create communities and not just posts.
Here's an example of a community:
Just think, one of Reddit's features for years was the "trending subreddits" list. Someone made that, someone else approved it. It got put on the front page, it became a core part of the experience. There were meetings!! Meetings where this was discussed. It was an OKR, maybe even of multiple people, was there a whole team?
But you and I understand that the essence of community is that you get a small group of people who interact and re-interact and who get used to seeing each other and who have fun doing this thing, whether it's shitposting memes or discussing God or something else. You grow past a certain size and now you are shouting into the void, which is the same experience you have every day, just go to your local pub and shout your hilarious comments at the TV and you'll have more listeners than your comments on a large subreddit.
"Trending subreddits," people literally came into daily stand-up, "Hi Jessica, how is the 'suddenly destroy Reddit communities just when they start growing and thereby make Reddit suck more' feature going?" "Well I ran into some roadblocks as the sudden influx of new users makes the statistics very hard to pull, I'm thinking of changing to a cron job that reassembles the list every hour." "Jessica, we've talked about this, making Reddit suck more is of top priority to my manager and my director, I don't care how you do it, just GET IT DONE and we can get a big bonus at the end of quarter" "I won't let you down, boss! Reddit WILL suck more by the end of this quarter."
I don't think it's still a thing anymore as-is but I don't think it was deleted for the fact that it was the make Reddit suck feature? I think they're still basically doing the same thing but just basically temp-autojoining users into those subreddits, "Reddit wasn't sucking fast enough when people had to opt-in to flashmobbing a promising community, now we're just going to shove the people in the door and scream 'you're a flashmob get to sucking!' and hope that works." More meetings were had on this!
getting 500 million monthly users like Reddit is the hard part
as someone who stopped using Reddit a year ago, i get it. topical communities no longer exist in just one place. if you’re interested in 3d printing, say, you can join a reddit, join a chat group (in Discord, Telegram, Matrix — whatever app of choice), join a FB group or explore the topic on TikTok, find a 3d-printing themed Mastodon instance, …: and each one of these hosts adjacent communities. Reddit is no longer the only “community of communities” on the internet. if you zoom out, it’s been losing that moat for a while. users can get by decently well these days by choosing from 5+ apps they might already have installed when exploring a topical community. reddit killing their share of that app space doesn’t really help them.
I've heard this, and was just reading a thread on Reddit where many users told of their mistreatment and unjustified banning. But anecdotally I've never actually noticed mod misbehavior, and I've been a Reddit user for like 17 years. Could be the subs I read ... most of which aren't extremely huge, I guess. Still, I feel like I should have been banned from somewhere at some point if capricious, power-hungry mods really were as rampant as they're made out to be.
You have to remember that Steve (spez), the CEO, is precisely one of those, and was the head moderator of r/jailbait before that finally shut down.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/14bxljj/the_return_of_...
It's borderline inexplicable to me. How could someone want this in the first place and how could they be willing to do it in a volunteer capacity?
Sure, the major frontpage subs will be fine, but there's plenty of more niche communities that are already dying/getting banned for being unmodded because no one wants to mod them. I literally opened a link to a sub today that was banned for being unmodded 2 hours ago, presumably because the last remaining mod deleted their account.
So many of the discussions here seem to be people mostly thinking of reddit as the big frontpage subs, which also seems to be what Reddit Corporate seems to think. What we're all likely about to see is how much value there is in the longer tail of smaller subs that are being run as a passion project by a few people in a niche community. It's easy to point to the small subs that are some power-trip for one mod or set of mods, but there's also plenty of small little subs that are niche and interesting and simply would never have enough interest or activity to support more than 2-3 mods.
I wasn't sure what it was going to be like when I was invited. It's not fun telling people to behave, but I've found a lot of personal satisfaction in coding moderation tasks and working with the team. There are whole classes of work that I've automated away and it's easy to deploy improvements.
There's also plenty of people who like the authority, or a thousand other reasons, but that's one example.
Being a gatekeeper for a popular subreddit is a form of meaningful influence. Meaningful influence can lead to money and other benefits. Reddit mods in the past have been exposed for using their influence to push certain content and block other kind.
Remember, "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People". <https://np.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_...>. This also applies to powermods, assuming they're not being paid on the side to push some ideology.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36350938
Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private - 1573 points, 12 hours ago, 915 comments
This is like a master class in how not to deal with this type of situation.
As with a lot of things Reddit has done in the last week this falls under then "Oh, you only care about this now??? Screw you Reddit".
Reddit has ~hundreds of millions of~ users and is not worth anything like that.
Why? Facebook's content is provided by all its users for free? So if Reddit can figure out a way to monetize it like Facebook, it's worth literally hundreds of billions of dollars.
Which is why the leadership of Reddit will do anything if there's a chance that they can dramatically increase the value of the company. From their perspective, it absolutely is worth the risk. From our perspective it isn't worth it, ofc, because the upside for us doesn't involve lifechanging amounts of money.
This feels so disingenuous:
> Subreddits exist for the benefit of the community of users who come to them for support and belonging and in the end, moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust.
Where the fuck were you guys when, for example, people were complaining about the mods over at /r/india?
If all these subreddit had instead migrated their users to a hastily built alternate frontend that web scrapped reddit.com, the entire mother site could have been taken down quite effectively.
There's plenty of methods for routing around ip-address blacklisting or region blocking.
Just as there's no law against web scrapping there's no law protecting the labor rights of the moderators who work for free. Overall it just strikes me as a weaker axis of attack.
Moderators are too concerned with weeding out people and bad content as soon as possible and as much as possible. But it's OK to have a bunch of low quality comments and posts, and just let the users decide what gets seen by most of the people.
I'm much more concerned with moderators thinking they can decide to protest on behalf of millions of people, than I am with millions of people seeing content that breaks a subreddits rules.
There's a reason every bar has bouncers.
Had the owner of twitter not fired all of his employees, they very well may have been able to seize the opportunity and develop an alternative which could have integrated with their current users and product.
Clearly the moderators have many psychological characteristics in common and are motivated by the exact same personality flaws and doubtless it is because of this that the commenters here are able to achieve such startling generality in their succinct evaluations!
The mods realized that they are replaceable and that they don't have infinite rights to the moderator spots on these subreddits. Did they not consider that they do not own anything here and are all just operating on reddit's platform and reddit could just remove them and install new mods?
It seems highly plausible to me that reddit has now effectively won this one, though, I strenuously think they could have achieved their goals with far far less negative press but it wouldn't really be reddit if they didn't do something in the maximally inefficient way.
I do think this could lead to a situation where reddit moderation is more democratized, with moderators being elected (in a more formal way than how some subs do it now) and I think that would be an overall net positive for the communities and for reddit as a whole. Moderators at this point operate as mostly benevolent dictators and benevolent dictatorships have their plusses but I think that the limitations are starting to show now.
Steve's statement about this really pissed me off, due to this ommision.
Fucking comical.
users that disabled the algorithm and only use niche subreddits never see the protest at all
I definitely think Reddit company’s view of the outcome is accurate, and that them choosing to not unilaterally open subreddits is favorable for them because it doesn’t matter too much, aside from useful information in old posts being locked away (for now)
There isn't one. At least not similar or consensus.
Weird to burn bridges without a plan.
It's just casual entertainment, not life/career.
That said you are right on the alternatives being in short supply. Which is a problem in itself and another reason to bail.
from the businesses perspective this is probably the first sensible decision they've made so far
Most mods have an issue because they want to mod from their phones. There are mods like me who use desktop exclusively and don't care about third party apps in the slightest.
More importantly, most users seem to want the subs reopened, and it isn't fair or just to punish the users because the mods can't mod the way they want to anymore.
The mods that actually polled their communities and acted on those results are the only ones I have respect for out of those protesting.
Hard to prove one way or the other at the moment since the subs that vote to go private are now inaccessible, but almost all polls I've seen have been in favor of the blackout. r/all consistently has highly-upvoted protest messages from the restricted subreddits.
> it isn't fair or just to punish the users because the mods can't mod the way they want to anymore
That a protest against X results in inconvenience for the customers/users of X is pretty mild. If that crosses the line into unacceptable, you'd be against the vast majority of protest/boycott/strike action.
Same here. Not a mod, but have always used Reddit from the desktop (with the new UI turned off), so zero interest in third-party apps. It's one thing to do messaging or email while out and about, but why would I want to intentionally use a text-intensive system like Reddit through a small screen without a keyboard to type on?
I wonder if the API change will end the practice of mods sharing automated block lists (Context for others: If you post in a wrongthink subreddit, many other subreddits will preemptively ban you regardless of your actual activity in them, if any). If so, and if there are fewer handfuls of powermods that control dozens of subreddits, I'm all for the change.
