* /r/InterestingAsFuck (11.5 million subs)
* /r/MildlyInteresting (22.3 million subs)
* /r/TIHI (1.7 million subs)
Plus many others.
These were subreddits that held a community vote with tens of thousands of votes to decide what type of content to allow.
NSFW content won, with the implication that NSFW subreddits cannot be monetized.
These subreddits are now restricted and unmoderated, available for request to new moderators through /r/redditrequest.
https://twitter.com/aaronp613/status/1671298446974656514
To me it doesn't seem like they actually violated any Reddit policy or code of conduct, particularly because the NSFW content was properly labeled.
https://www.redditinc.com/policies/moderator-code-of-conduct
https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy
The same admin account was also caught quietly flipping the NSFW subs back to SFW status. So this is clearly just about getting back that monetization.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14ebl7k/umodcodeo...
...no, it's clearly about someone at reddit raging out of control and grasping at straws to justify banhammering mods in a desperate attempt to save a ship that has split in two, is on fire, leaking radioactive waste, while sharks circle.
I've seen this happen on mailing lists and discussion boards where an admin/mod throws a major wobbly and just starts banning people like crazy for the slightest infractions to scare everyone else into "behaving." That's about when quietly someone who is respected pools together every email they can get their hands on and invites everyone to mailing list run elsewhere.
Edit: long live r/animetitties
and back that normal experience of millions of readers of those subreddits.
You're the minority and you're expecting to run the show. That's not how it works.
Maybe it'll also mean turning off user generated content too, and only have admin made posts, the same as Digg did. They could hire the power-users to keep making the relevant posts.
People you don't have on contract are a liability
That's the whole point of reddit; for various reasons they convinced people to give them fuckloads of free labor.
Reddit brilliantly acted like "king" giving fiefdoms out to mods and pretending like it was "theirs." "Here, dear mod! Here is some internet land to rule mostly as you see fit."
Well...the king demanded a huge tithe, a good portion of the lords told the king his mother was a hamster and his father smelled like elderberries....and the king is now laying down the law and making it very clear who everything actually belongs to.
The problem is: without any lords, the king has no power, because he can't possibly administer all the fiefdoms himself...and right now, a lot of the peasants really fucking hate the king, and like the lords.
Right now spez is trying to scare mods straight and reward those who toe the line by redistributing fiefdoms to them.
how so? there are more than enough moderators left who have no issue with reddit's current behaviour and will continue modding for free.
I guess they could audit submission history, but there's a chance of that blowing up as users decide the mods are shills. I've rarely seen Reddit as mad as when they decide someone is a shill, and the vitriol is likely to make the new mods' lives hard. Especially so if they're new mods, and aren't as used to people hurling insults and maybe death threats at them (I don't know how likely death threats are, but it seems like everyone with any online visibility gets them these days).
I'm sure they could eventually find mods, but I think there will be chaos in that process. I guess the question is whether they're willing to extend the current chaos to keep free moderation, or if they'd rather pony up some money to end it now.
Edit: added "free" in the last paragraph, last sentence between "keep" and "moderation"
Shadowban all users. Respond to their comments and posts with AI generated responses only visible to the poster. Redditors famously don't want others to know their handle so they won't share it around. You could only tell from a signed out device reading something you commented in.
Flood the site with generated posts and 'engagement' that is all ad friendly. Turn the whole place into Weenie Hut Jr.
Do this pre IPO then bail forever.
* Tumblr was living from NSFW content and when they banned NSFW content Tumblr basically ceased to exist.
* Reddit is living from free moderation and when they banned 3rd party tools for moderation, because Reddit ones sucks, they might be going in same direction as Tumblr.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20230612074029/https://old.reddi...
In Russian there's a saying that can be translated as "doorman (or consiege/bouncer) syndrome", where an otherwise pitiful person (a doorman controlling access to some venue, more common in Soviet union even for e.g. dorms) has a little bit of local power and discretion and uses it in at best arbitrary, and at worst actively malicious and power-trippy way, because they can. That's your average /vocal/ internet moderator.
A good example from Reddit is recent /r/comicbooks case where any mention of Rippaverse comics were being removed and users banned because one of the mods disagrees with the author's right-libertarian politics. It's even worse in Facebook groups where I've seen mods remove users for no reason, including someone who happened to create/join the mod team on the first major city-wide board-gaming group banning a bunch of people explicitly over politics (not discussing politics in the group, just having wrong politics at all), because "it's muh group!" (pretty much an actual quote)
Why would reddit stand for losers on a power trip controlling a community for a popular topic on their property, just because they were "there first"? It makes no sense. I totally buy an argument that most users just want to participate, and they only need mods to maintain the manners and clean up spam.
Reddit should just kick all the mods out from the major/general-purpose/large-geographical-entity subreddits, and have paid mods to do the above.
But yes. This isn't just some freak accident explosion from mods. This has been bubbling up for at least 7 years and is partially a result of Reddit refusing to help their free labor continue to give free labor.
Which is sad because it WORKED. Mods just made their own tools or used the tools of other. But now Reddit is taking those tools away instead of promising better native support.
But by now they have probably irrecoverably destroyed their relationship to the existing community. Maybe they can build a new community.
I feel you think the answers are obvious. They are not to me.
I am glad these subreddits have been returned back to the community, perhaps the Reddit staff can moderate for now.
The community voted on the changes. You can go look up the polls that were held for yourself.
>perhaps the Reddit staff can moderate for now
Lol. Not a viable business model for reddit. Their entire revenue is less than what facebook spends on just moderation.
I hope so. Put their money where their mouth is if they want the rules they refuse to put in the TOS.
But from your POV, we both know that won't happen. They just recruite more power hungry, egotistical jerks because it's cheap. And you'll continue to hate them.
Once this tsunami dies down, we'll put it back the way it was before. In the meantime, when there's significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...), we can take the penalty off. The trouble is that it's not exactly easy to tell significant new information apart from significant new drama. Plus I was offline for part of the day yesterday.
As you can see from the above HN Search link, it's not like HN has been lacking for Reddit discussion—the problem is all the other way.
Why change the weighting given stories on a given topic without notice?
And how do you reconcile this change with HN's long-standing policy that "We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or YC startups are the story", which is "literally the first rule of HN moderation"?
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320816>
Reiterated within the past week: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36366909>
