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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

#401

Post by joshvm »

jhanschoo wrote: post #396
harryf wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What gives me hope is if you ever take a break from social media you realize how worthless it all is. It really doesn’t hurt to disengage. For similar reasons it’s possible for new networks to show up which disrupt the old, such as TikTok. The point is as individuals we are way less dependent on social media than we imagine.

For reddit specifically, I have to disagree. It's a sad state the Internet has become, where you used to get coherent results from decentralized blogs when you google a sufficiently niche hobbyist topic. These days you just get content marketing spam. Append reddit to your search and you get subject-matter experts. The valuable conversation and folk knowledge is all siloed on social media.

Reddit successfully centralised forums and made it convenient because you didn't need 20+ logins. The other half is link sharing/doom scrolling (the addictive stuff), which replaced Digg, Stumbleupon, etc.

In the not-so-distant past if you wanted expert help and non-astroturfed suggestions (or even just memes), that's where you went. Those places still exist for a lot of fields and the experts still hang out (and often are better than Reddit), but you still have the problem of finding them and managing identities across boards. In many cases the moderation is superior. Reddit now suffers from the problem where it's so big that people can run very subtle advertising campaigns to push products. It's still much better than blogspam, but you can still only really trust the negative/critical reviews.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#402

Post by slaymaker1907 »

bmhin wrote: post #48
brucethemoose2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord, where everything will be siloed off and then enshittified again :(

That is my prediction as well. It's unfortunate as we'll enter the unindexed web where all that helpful content you can find by appending "reddit" onto any search will no longer be getting produced. All of it hidden in discords, out of sight. Who knows, maybe there will be an easy way to get stuff published out to the proper web. Things like community FAQs or guides that would be broadly of use. I think the loss of t…

Honestly, email lists are better than Discord in a lot of ways. There are standard ways to make them indexable via Google, you can use whatever app you want to, threads are a first class feature most people use, and since it's so open filtering can be very powerful. Bots are also extremely easy to write since basically every programming language has the ability to send email (and usually also to receive it via at least one email server protocol which isn't controlled by the distribution list, but by the bot writer).

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#403

Post by JshWright »

proaralyst wrote: post #200
minhazm wrote: post #117

Reddit has handled this pretty terribly but I also think people are being unreasonable. This is no different than me creating a third party YouTube client, charging for it and displaying no ads. Why would YouTube allow me to do that? And why should Reddit allow third party apps to do that? Reddit screwed up in the first place allowing third party apps that they have zero control over to build a full frontend replacem…

As I understand it, mods are mostly annoyed because they've been using the API to compensate for features lacking in their official mod tools. Making the API cost money means the unofficial mod tools cost money, and hiding NSFW content in the API means they can't moderate (or remove) that content though those tools. I think the blackouts have got wider support because users are also annoyed about losing the 3rd party…

The timing of the changes was another major factor. Most of the app developers I’ve seen comment were more than happy to pay for API access (assuming Reddit set a good faith price point), but 30 days is not enough time to make that transition.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#404

Post by heatmiser »

I understand (note: I don't necessarily agree) with Reddit's decision to alter its API amidst the AI renaissance of 2023. OpenAI and their ilk recognized the value of this dataset for training, regrettably for Reddit, before Reddit itself did. Now, it's Spring 2023, the data horse has bolted, and Huffman is looking for dollars to wipe the egg off of his face.

Though Huffman should have foreseen such a turn of events, we all collectively erred in the same way when we surrendered our social graphs to Facebook in the 2000s. Furthermore, Facebook committed a blunder similar to Reddit's, allowing Twitter to establish their social graph before Zuckerberg secured that data.

To the disadvantage of thousands of communities, millions of users, and even the Reddit corporation itself, capitalist forces are pushing Reddit's leadership to recoup every possible cent of opportunity cost.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#405

Post by ShamelessC »

andreareina wrote: post #340
silcoon wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/reddit

> We moderate less, not more, when YC or a YC-related startup is the story https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937269

There's really no reason for them to be honest about this sort of thing and I've seen plenty of shady shit from moderation here to make me distrust them.

Which isn't me asking for an explanation/stance. However trustworthy you find the moderation to be here, any explanation they give is inherently biased towards an obvious desire to remain employed.

From my perspective - this is a forum/social media site that is popular and _not_ infested with ads. It seems obvious to me that what they do gain is influence with a certain group of people (investors) and as a filter/brain-drain/funnel for entrepreneurs.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#406

Post by clnq »

tiffanyg wrote: post #81
clnq wrote: 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…

Many people using scroll sites are addicted and do it compulsively.

It does not mean they are “terminally online” or dysfunctionally addicted, but they are addicted and relatively unable to drop scrolling regularly as a habit.

Also, mods are volunteers and it’s completely normal for volunteers to be dismissed. There are no laws that grant them any entitlements from, claims to, or ownership of Reddit.

Reddit won’t become a shell of itself if mod dismissal and replacement happens. Most of the users don’t know the moderators nor do they care. A vocal minority will be upset and very loud for two weeks and then continue using the site as normal.

There is some value in not rocking the boat and keeping existing mods, but Reddit can easily survive replacing them.

This does not mean that I champion, condone, or endorse how Reddit has been acting. But I’m just stating that these platforms don’t fail as quickly as some people claim they would.

Groups of vocal users have been abandoning Facebook for years, and it’s still tremendously popular. Reddit is similar. A critical mass of users carries a lot of momentum.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#407

Post by [deleted] »

Kilgore54 wrote: post #322
deepsun wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet every time I point to the root of the problem -- that most social media web properties are privately owned by their respective shareholders, who just benevolently let you store your* texts and photos at their premises for free -- I get downvoted heavily here on HN. The community doesn't want to hear that here.

Yeah absolutely The problem here is the profit motive. What we need are sustainable communities that are not controlled by sectors of private capital and they treat their users like products or widgets. I know some people are in America, especially above a certain age, refuse to think this way. Decades of Chicago school neoliberal propaganda has convinced them that anything good has to be driven by a profit motive. I…

[deleted]

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#408

Post by yanderekko »

moskie wrote: 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…

>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.

I would absolutely take profit-driven moderation over the petty tyranny of your stereotypical reddit mod. These mods are not heroically channeling some sort of vox populi.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#409

Post by mandmandam »

prattmic wrote: post #226
jorvi wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That number seems incredibly unlikely. I’m a relatively casual Snapchat user, and from ~45GB of cellular use, ~3.5GB is from Snapchat. That’s just egress bandwidth (from Snapchat’s point of view), they also have to ingress my snaps as well as temporarily host stories and snaps in transit.

Q1 earnings ( https://s25.q4cdn.com/442043304/files/doc_financials/2023/q1... ) says 383M daily active users and $1.3B in costs (including sales, administrative, etc), for ~$3.50/user/quarter or ~$14/user/year. So far above $2.50/user/year. Even just using cost of revenue is ~$4.50/user/year.

I clarified that I meant just infrastructure costs, and posted the source.

Even so - what's $4.50 per user per year - 40 minutes of minimum wage work? 45 seconds of a lawyer's time?

For sending, and processing, and receiving GBs and GBs of video?

For (not even) this cost, we give up control of political narratives? We let people like Huffman and Musk and Zuckerberg control what we get to see?

They take money from tinpot dictators and a selection box of wealthy grifters. We let our parents and grandparents get taken advantage of by every scam artist on the planet with a few dollars. Why? To save $4.50 a year?

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#410

Post by protocolture »

satvikpendem wrote: post #71

> 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…

Private subs are a feature mods have access to under the existing system.

Private subs existed before this protest.

Setting a sub to private is moderation. And likely mods are still moderating just a much smaller amount of content from users already in the community.

Its not reasonable to kick out mods because they are protesting, and reddits response is a massive stretch.

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