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Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

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Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#91

What's the end game here for reddit? There's no way this would end well.

These things are fairly simple to game out, I've got some money on reddit surviving but not without taking damage. That being said, I don't agree with it, but as people are well aware there is no good alternative.

The game-plan as I've found, (dons being Reddit mask, and I'm not associated with them in any way).

Was always, we own this data (not the community) we bought this when we bought out the founders in 2015/2016, we need to monetize it before interest rates cause an IPO to evaporate, we're going to do this no matter what. We don't want people being able to delete their content (Shredder App), and we can charge for access to this valuable corpus data, and we have all the control because we control the infrastructure. That's where they are coming from.

Now, If you look at which protests were successful in history, and which protests were not, you see that it really comes down to whether at the end of the day the authority making the decisions is responsive to the people demanding change.

Reddit has never been responsive in any of their actions towards external non-employees requesting changes. They've only ever provided illusory promises, or things they were already going to do (but didn't announce), and they had to fake the first communities until they could get enough people interested.

So, they'll let the protest occur for two days because it was planned, and if you crush it you look bad, and you can just ignore it because it doesn't affect the bottom line, people will grow tired and if it lasts longer they would have an automated way to replace the mods.

People will whine in their corners when that happens, and the people that didn't see what was happening, or didn't have an easy alternative will go back to their habits using reddit and supporting their overall decisions mindlessly because its habit. Click-whirr, fixed action pattern, no change happens. Its repeated over and over and over.

From what I've seen, None of the mods actually gamed out how this would go down and took pre-emptive measures to have a fallback and move their communities off the hostile platform. Some are scrambling to get Lemmy to do that, but Lemmy has been tested by who? I hadn't even heard of it until earlier this week so I doubt its a big project, let alone one that can scale to tens of thousands or above.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#92
post #13

Another day and another nail in another awesome online community that has terrible leadership. Where will the communities move to? What new areas of the Internet will be created?

https://kbin.social is a great alternative from what I can see. https://kbin.social/m/apple is already thriving, as is https://kbin.social/m/programming

The concern I have with these federated instances is I don't see how they resolve the long term problems of stability.

Content on instances can disappear at a moment's notice if it goes down. My favorite part about reddit is the amount of information it has that is well-indexed by google.

These Lemmy and kbin alternatives might fulfill the moment-to-moment chatter, but it worries me that there's no guarantee of continuity for information. The best you can do is be discerning about the instance you pick. If there was a mechanism for distributing information across instances so it's saved, or some other assurance it'd make me happier about it.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#93

Another day and another nail in another awesome online community that has terrible leadership. Where will the communities move to? What new areas of the Internet will be created?

[flagged]

"neckbeards" ? Really, do you know what one is :)

A real "neckbeard" would not be caught dead doing anything in a GUI on a tiny Cell Phone. neckbeards use USENET, which seems to be what REDDIT cloned years ago by putting lipstick on a pig.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#95

The dishonesty continues. > if they are no longer interested in moderating that community They're still interested. They're just protesting your policies. > [if] at least one mod [...] wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team. This one takes the cake. They're dangling a carrot: hey, any low-ranked mod interested in taking over…

Doesn't seem dishonest to me.

Reddit cares more about having an open subreddit then the mods do.

This was the obvious conclusion

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#96
post #24

Ah the classic beatings will continue until morale improves approach. Starting to think Reddit leadership is genuinely not all that sharp

Reddit leadership and the mods are replaceable cogs of a machine. The machine always wins. How many times do we have to repeat the cycle to learn the only choice is - to be part of the machine or not. Beyond a point controlling the mindlessness of the machine is not possible. As these systems get larger chimps with 3 inch brains only have an illusion of control.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#97
post #76

We (the internet community) made such a terrible mistake with social media. We formed connections and communities and friendships on sites like Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system. How awful it is to reduce human connection to that. To think that I am only allowed to maintain certain soc…

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other...

>Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#98

> If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team. Moderators exist to moderate a community, not to shut it down wholesale. Reddit's respon…

Mods have always been told that subreddits are their spaces to operate and that as long as they're not breaking any of the site-wide rules, they are free to do whatever they wish. This is a violation of that trust.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#99
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? How can this end poorly? Most people browsing Reddit are addicted with no viable substitutes. Breaking their addiction through continued blackouts would end badly. Replacing some mods no user cares about will hardly have an impact. Lets be realistic.

Yes, let's be realistic. Most people browsing reddit are not addicted. This isn't 2013. The site is massive, and, the most important users aren't just random "terminally online" people. Continuing to antagonize a key "constituency" in what makes the platform so incredibly valuable is a TERRIBLE strategy. Even replacing mods of small / unimportant (alone) subreddits is not a good idea (right now). That said, I do thin…

To be fair, Tumblr has since pulled out of its nosedive under Automattic's leadership... although it still isn't profitable, lol.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#100
post #70
post #30

For someone kind of out of the loop, can someone explain what they think reddit should do instead of charging for their API access? After all Reddit is a business right? What alternatives do users want reddit to do instead?

Reddit has entirely failed at building their ad business, which every other major social site has done successfully. Reddit makes 1$ per user-month on ads, while Instagram makes $35. If they could even get to $2, they would be profitable. The API access issue is largely a side-show to this core problem. The challenge for this is that targeting on reddit is harder than other sites which have lengthy profiles and inter…

Also reddit users hate ads and widely promote adblock.
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