Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout ‘will pass’

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 271 posts

Re: Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout ‘will pass’

#191

Post by dendrite9 »

danaris wrote: post #175
stcroixx wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moderation is the worst part of Reddit. If this succeeds in running off these folks, I’d consider that the best outcome.

Moderation is also the best part of Reddit. You just don't notice the moderation that's good—almost by definition.

I used to hang out on a forum where people regularly said they liked it because there was no moderation. Conveniently forgetting that if you woke up at 3am the boards had posts from Thailand, or India, or Russia and in the morning they were cleaned up.

That board never had no moderation, it just managed it in a way where most people either didn't realize, or appreciated it. Then if someone crossed one of the few lines they would start screeching about how for X years there's been no moderation and the boar has gone to shit.

Re: Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout ‘will pass’

#192

Post by joecot »

Asdrubalini wrote: post #182
joecot wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that reddit's entire system depends on unpaid labor from volunteer moderators. And they just pissed a lot of those moderators off. Yeah, reddit can reopen those subreddits if they want to and kick the mods. But who are they going to get to moderate it? They can't afford to hire staff to moderate themselves, reddit is already unprofitable. Are they going to do an application process for scab mods? That…

I personally woudn't mind not having moderators, as the ones we have at the moment are really bad and have pushed their political views in apparently impartial subs (like /r/politics).

I think the general reddit community underestimates how important moderation is. Yes, you have some moderators who go overboard, push a personal agenda on something that's supposed to be a neutral subreddit, etc. But subreddits without active moderation very quickly (in order of increasing tragedy) lose their focus, get overtaken by spam, or become hangouts for Nazis. reddit closes unmoderated subs for a reason.

Also a large chunk of the people who complain about moderators are actually upset that moderators stop their subreddits from being overtaken by Nazis. If you want completely unmoderated anonymous public discourse, go to 4Chan and see how it goes there. Though even that is moderated.

Re: Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout ‘will pass’

#193

Post by danaris »

420420420 wrote: post #69

Reddit refugee here, can someone explain why moving everyone to kbin.social is not being talked about?

To some extent, the answer to that question is circular: it's not being talked about, because no one knows about it. No one knows about it, because it's not being talked about.

As we've seen with various other social media implosions in the recent past, a big part of what makes a migration successful is exactly what made the social media service successful in the first place: network effects. Get enough people on board, have them spread it to their own circles, and you'll hit a critical mass and be able to migrate to the new service with most of the community intact.

Unfortunately, far too often the conversation around where to migrate to looks like the XKCD "Standards" comic [0].

[0] https://xkcd.com/927/

Re: Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout ‘will pass’

#194

Post by Timon3 »

Simulacra wrote: post #12

I went to Reddit, the page was black, so I just went somewhere else. I still don't see how this is going to motivate anyone to do anything.

> I went to Reddit, the page was black, so I just went somewhere else

It's that part.

Re: Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout ‘will pass’

#197

Post by data-ottawa »

willis936 wrote: post #124
xyst wrote: post #88

Reddit CEO's fragile ego was hurt during the AMA and his personal account was downvoted into oblivion. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut and tank a couple of news cycles of bad press. This 2 day moratorium is now much more likely to become a multi-week protest/blackout. Reddit board should look at issuing a "no confidence" vote on this guy.

Offer Selig the position.

Selig acquihire to head of iOS/mobile dev could have been a good move.

Re: Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout ‘will pass’

#198

Post by cykros »

Kazrath wrote: post #185
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the blackout is only for two days then they're right Yeah... I don't know the tradeoffs at play but 2 days is... extremely insignificant / probably a bad decision by all of the moderators? It sends a message sure but, it's a bunch of "whiny reddit mods" versus C-level executives in a "help us make API more affordable versus help us not lose a ton of money offering generous free API hosting/usage" negotiation. Ho…

>Why should they foot the bill for the API calls? You have a serious misunderstanding of how this works. They are footing the bill for API calls regardless. All reddit access by users is to external public facing API's. We are not on their internal network. They MUST have accessible servers + data costs. In all honesty the 3rd parties are probably more efficient as they are a lot less bloated which means LESS costs.

I'm just waiting to see third party apps that, in lieu of API access, work by scraping the website, and are a LOT heavier on the servers.

A major selling point of API's is to lighten the load.

Re: Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout ‘will pass’

#199

Post by George83728 »

kibwen wrote: post #117
mr_00ff00 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not about revenue. As people have mentioned already, the CEO said the blackout has had almost no revenue impact. it’s funny to create a protest and hoping for change by showing Reddit that the community can walk away…and then using reddit to organize it. You are basically showing you can’t think of any good alternatives to organizing or chatting with people. So you will continue to use Reddit, even during a prot…

...Except that /r/ModCoord does have other venues, like the Discord linked in the sidebar. They mirror announcements to Reddit because that's the only place that's guaranteed to reach everyone involved, who are on Reddit by definition.

If they don't need reddit, then they should stop using it to demonstrate that point.

> "I'm not addicted, I can quit anytime I want."

> "Okay then, prove it and quit today."

> "....No."

Re: Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout ‘will pass’

#200

Post by norgie »

oxygen_crisis wrote: post #83
98codes wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing they care about is bottom line, and this, "Huffman says the blackout hasn’t had “significant revenue impact”," is key. To lose 95.8% of your site (judged by the 8467 out of 8838 subreddits gone dark) and not have a revenue impact at all raises some questions, primarily if there are any revenue streams based on usage, or only on monthly subscriptions and non-view-based ad contracts?

> To lose 95.8% of your site (judged by the 8467 out of 8838 subreddits gone dark) That's out of the 8838 that made a pledge to go dark. Those ~400 are just the ones that went "restricted" (read-only) instead of private, or flaked on the pledge. There are over a million subreddits, the blackout doesn't even reach one percent of them.

Your denominator is pretty much useless in terms of measuring user impact since subreddit subscriber size is not evenly distributed.
Post reply on HN