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Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

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Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#81
post #61

The masses got stampeded into supporting the protest because people like to feel that they're taking part in some righteous battle. Sucks for spez that he got outmaneuvered by a cabal of mods who derive their feeling of importance (and oftentimes a side income) from having control over a bunch of popular subreddits who are upset that their status is being threatened. Hope Reddit comes out of this alright.

Their app and site sucks. 3rd party apps exist because of that. They can't accept that its their fault.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#82
post #12

I'm getting whiplash. First Axios said they are not going to remove moderators, then someone on Reddit said they will, then someone here said they won't, which is it? I really don't think the vast majority of people care. HN readers do, but that's a narrow subset

HN readers are 1-2-5 years ahead what happens in the market. you can tell a lot of things that are coming down the pipe if you pay attention on HN. Once the "nerds" give up on reddit it will be an uphill battle to keep the site viable.

I have a feeling Reddit is mostly nerds though, after this I doubt there is going to be anyone left.

Recently I've been moving to Facebook Groups. Compared to Reddit the groups are much more niche, which is a good thing.

On Reddit there is a general sub about a hobby I'm interested in with 198k subscribers, on Facebook I've found groups with the specific niches of that I'm interested in with 16k - 30k subscribers. The questions are much more specific, and the people there are a lot more knowledgeable. The people on there seem friendlier too.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#83
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The richest part here is where spez refers to moderators as a "landed gentry": https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blacko... “And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.” What does that make spez relative to the constituents in his community?

[flagged]

Rent a storefront

Get people to run and supply it for free

Sell the supplies and profit

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#84

If you don't pay for it, it's not your community. Again and again people think they get something for free, which they don't. If it's free you're a volunteer for the company, if you pay you're a customer.

Goes the other way. Reddit isn't paying the mods who run these communities. Without all this unpaid labor, the site can not function.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#85
post #23
post #9

If this wasn't connected to the blackout, this would be great news. There are a few mods, who when reddit was young, decided to squat every existing country's subreddit, along with common words. Those subs now work well with active mods below them. But the squatter still has full power, and can override any other mod. Now it will hopefully be easier to kick those mods.

It's often struck me as odd how some moderators can be modding 50+ sometimes even high as 100+ subreddits. Why so many? I doubt they can be reasonably expected to moderate all of them. Shouldn't there be a limit?

I moderated a few decently popular subreddits for a while (a couple hundred posts a day, nothing crazy).

I will say that most moderation work on Reddit can be done independently of a particular sub and scales okay across subreddits. Like the additional effort of moderating 100 subreddits vs 1 would be nowhere near 100x. It would probably be closer to like 5x the amount of work.

And there are benefits to moderating many subreddits.

Most moderation is keeping your automod filters up to date to stop the never-ending onslaught of porn bots, crypto scammers, and obvious fake accounts looking to farm karma. Everyday I'd scan through both the stuff the filters caught and the stuff they didn't and tweak the automod settings to be better, then most of the time I'd copy paste those settings across subs.

The other hard part of being a mod is communicating with the other mods. Like I would only be online moderating one hour out of the day and so all communication with async with anonymous strangers. This again benefits from having mods span many subreddits because you can quickly get to know the other moderators in similar spaces and you all pass information around to each other.

For subs that require user verification this again is a better user experience if you moderate several similar subs because users can verify with you once and be approved across many subs.

The communities actually tend to do a pretty good job of moderating themselves via reporting and downvoting so even if there's only one mod on a subreddit they act way more like an appeals process than an initial judge of fate, most content moderation is actually outsourced to the community as a whole with the mods only responsible for curating a space free of obvious spam and acting as an appeals process for people who have content on the borderline.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#86
post #23
post #9

If this wasn't connected to the blackout, this would be great news. There are a few mods, who when reddit was young, decided to squat every existing country's subreddit, along with common words. Those subs now work well with active mods below them. But the squatter still has full power, and can override any other mod. Now it will hopefully be easier to kick those mods.

It's often struck me as odd how some moderators can be modding 50+ sometimes even high as 100+ subreddits. Why so many? I doubt they can be reasonably expected to moderate all of them. Shouldn't there be a limit?

Power mods are a real problem on Reddit.

It's the same group of people who strong-armed a lot of smaller subreddits into participating in this 'protest'.

The end result of this protest looks like it's going to be that Reddit is going to remove a lot of the mods that the community has despised for years.

It would seem this mod pity party is backfiring in the most spectacular way possible.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#87
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean if they follow your plan and replace the moderators of the subreddits I enjoy then I'm done with Reddit. Reddit can't expect to freeride off various communities and then kick out mods without a reasonable excuse, and this definitely does not classify.

And if they allow popular subreddits to remain private indefinitely then a lot more users will leave than just the ones who oppose the API changes. Better to force communities back open and let the most obstinate users leave than keep them private to satisfy the feelings of that obnoxious minority.

> force communities back open

Force communities back open, how? I've read countless comments over the past few days about how Reddit can just reopen all the privated subreddits with new moderators, without explaining where those new moderators were going to come from.

Curating and maintaining a community takes a LOT of effort, and I'm not convinced it's that easy to find people willing to do it for free. Just think about open source projects and how many have died when the sole maintainer called it quits.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#89
post #18

Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36347711 554 point, 5 hours ago, 518 comments => not on the front page. No, it's not the algorithm.

Yeah, its there in the ranking algorithm. Any post which starts getting more comments than votes gets downranked.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#90
post #59
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exactly. There have been a few tech waves where nerd behaviour was the leading indicator by a few years. Search engine move from AltaVista to Google (yes, I'm old). Laptop move to Macbook Pro's. Ignore the nerds at your peril.

lol. you're not that old. remember the days when Intel was kicking AMD's ass and AMD was mostly building a worse Intel clone? Raise your hand if any of the following say anything to you: K5, K6, Duron. If you raised your hand and can go back even further in time tell me at what frequency did a Z80 run. hahahahaah

You’re so old that your username has a stand alone FPU >:)
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