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

Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 1001 posts

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

#121

Post by 101011 »

unclekev wrote: post #86
e2le wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think that's true. r/nba, a top 10 active subreddit at the time of going private, put it to a public vote where the overwhelming majority of the community voted to suspend indefinitely.

This was during the NBA finals, mind you. Hard to put that sort of result on a small group of mods.

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

#122

Post by hackmehoff33 »

janalsncm wrote: post #31

Reddit could have avoided all of this years ago by building out the tools that moderators claim to need. Instead, they relied on third parties to create them. Doing this would have nullified mods’ strongest justification for protesting. While removing 3rd party apps is certainly annoying for users, mods are what keep the site functioning. The fact that Reddit chose to take this course of action tells me that they don…

Reddit has been losing its cache and core producers since mid 2010’s. I miss the days when their was a barrier to entry of moderate intelligence to participate.

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

#123

Post by tester457 »

fy20 wrote: post #82
x86x87 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

The lack of search indexing is a major downside though.

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

#124

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

BeefWellington wrote: post #102
janalsncm wrote: post #31

Reddit could have avoided all of this years ago by building out the tools that moderators claim to need. Instead, they relied on third parties to create them. Doing this would have nullified mods’ strongest justification for protesting. While removing 3rd party apps is certainly annoying for users, mods are what keep the site functioning. The fact that Reddit chose to take this course of action tells me that they don…

The kicker here is, if this is all for an IPO, as an investor, would these moves give you more confidence in the leadership or less? I can kinda see arguments for both directions, but I can think of more that would cause me to have less confidence. The biggest IMO is that what's happening here is a gamble by leadership that people are so drawn to Reddit that they'll give up their far superior mobile apps or desktop e…

What if the intent is to increase brand and impending IPO awareness? Investors don’t care about ethics, and they’re well aware that the majority of users won’t care about this decision.

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

#125

Post by Accujack »

Klonoar wrote: post #62

One somewhat-related bit on the topic of moderators: does it bother anyone else that the stewards of some of these communities are effectively 100% anonymous? Are we actually okay with these spaces that shape significant discussion/sentiment being guided by people who lack accountability? I want to be clear that I'm not saying we should be doxxing mods or anything, but if there is a significant changeover of moderato…

>Are we actually okay with these spaces that shape significant discussion/sentiment being guided by people who lack accountability?

No, but there's no way to change this situation because Reddit won't create a situation where they have oversight capabilities for mods... that creates too much liability for them. In addition to getting value for the free labor of mods, Reddit also gets a legal shield.

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

#126

Post by foobarbecue »

wmeredith wrote: post #93
jupp0r wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't prove this, but I believe that being an open platform with lots of cool apps built around it used to be what drove its power users towards using Reddit in the first place.

Twitter was the same way. Then they kicked that community to the curb. It’ll happen again.

Remember when Facebook had a thriving app community? With that farming game and the Scrabble thing?

It's certainly a pattern.

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

#127

Post by wellthisisgreat »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #16

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.

> 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.

Reddit should have thought about it shouldn’t they? Not paying mods and content creators means it’s not their content and people don’t have to listen to a handful of glorified web developers.

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

#128

Post by Loveaway »

This is so sad honestly. Like wtf is going on, no apology, no good will, doubling down on the complete moral suicide of Reddit. To push an app no-one ever liked, you know that, but whatever. No-one likes “new” Reddit either, you know that, but whatever. Who’s even gonna use the site after this? Social media zombie sheeple is all that's going to be left. Congrats on your dumb little site, from the front-page of the Internet, to the rear end of the internet. You killed your babies, man. Antagonising your most loyal users, for what? Bit of cash? Are you guys starving or what??

Man idk. I hope San Francisco is doing good. This is supposed to be the city of hippies and love, but lately not so much good news coming out of there. It really makes me sad to see Reddit explode like this.

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

#129

Post by hughesjj »

goda90 wrote: post #25
jfasi wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the community decides to leave, it won't be because of API pricing, it'll be because the content and spaces they used to enjoy were taken offline because of a minority of moderators.

There are lots of users that are unhappy with Reddit for this. I've stopped using it this week.

[dead]

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

#130

Post by Accujack »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #99

Something I want to ask before: I've noticed that some people have made a connection between the decision to effectively shut down Reddit's API and the increasing popularity of LLM/ChatGPT, and it does seem plausible. What's interesting is that Twitter also closed down their API access merely months ago. Are these two occurrences related, or was Twitter's action also a response to ChatGPT/LLM? (Also to be totally fai…

>some people have made a connection between the decision to effectively shut down Reddit's API and the increasing popularity of LLM/ChatGPT

Those people really don't have an idea how either of those work, nor how cause and effect work.

See also the graph showing that the decrease in the number of pirates in the world's oceans has contributed to climate change because "pirates are cool".

Post reply on HN