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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

#131
post #55

Shockers!! Funny how these mods who work for free thought they have any leverage.. now if they control the instances like a federated nodes, then maybe.

They did have some leverage but only so long as Reddit was still trying to keep up appearances. They probably did the equation and figured that bad optics for a little while outweighs possible long term gains. At that point all the mods power vanishes.

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

#132

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…

I believe this is more than speculation. Pretty sure that someone from Reddit basically said as much in one of the transcripts or conversations shared by Apollo’s dev. Reddit feels they are getting burned by letting their data be used to train LLMs for free.

That said, they were also letting people exceed their API rate limits by massive amounts, so hard for me to put the blame anywhere but with Reddit.

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

#133
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?

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 ma…

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

#134
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?

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 ma…

Thanks for writing this down. I don’t know about the details of Reddit moderation for popular subs, but I’ve moderated a pretty tiny one, and have some friends who moderate small communities elsewhere.

The perception that Mods are all power hungry and looking to impose their will is all consuming in some circles, ans it frustrates me. Most of the moderation is pure drudgery that is uninteresting and un controversial. Occasionally a mod will be wrong, or cross a line, and that sucks. But there is a real lack of appreciation for the work these volunteers do day to day.

Like, when I talk about this stuff with some friends who are nerds but don’t hang out in the same circles as any mods, they have no idea that mods are actually doing work beyond occasionally banning someone.

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

#135
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> put it to a public vote

Those votes were brigaded by people pushing the blackout, they are not representative of the overall community.

The average user of Reddit completely ignored/scrolled past those polls because "whats this doing in the NBA sub"

I find it hard to have any faith in those polls considering one of the subs that I mod that has ~3500 members got just over 4800 votes on the poll.

The other sub I mod with 1300 members got 800 votes (which averages 10 posts per week from a core regular group of users)

I do not believe for a second that a sub with less than 100 'active' monthly members had more than 60% of the total lifetime population of that sub come online all of a sudden and vote in the communities best interest.

Then on the other side of it, you've got subs with millions of members that had 20k responses. The average user did not (and does not) care. Now that those subs have been re-polled without being flooded by protesters, it's a overwhelming "No, leave us out of this"

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

#136
post #67

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 could have avoided all of this years ago by building out the tools that moderators claim to need. I moderate a small subreddit and don't even know what tools they are talking about. I don't want to say goodbye to RedReader.

Good news, red reader was granted an accessibility exemption so it's sticking around.

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

#137
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?

The mods in /r/anarchism are selected by voting.

That's amazing and wonderful. The only guys who use a vote are anarchists.

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

#138

Making a subreddit private is a built in, native reddit feature. If the mods are still actively moderating, just doing so in a private community, how is it breaking any rules? Sounds like they are just making use of a reddit feature.

For small subreddits that may work, but for the larger ones Reddit doesn't care, they won't let such technicalities get in the way of their revenue.

The only way to really "win" here is to abandon the platform en masse, and delete all your content before you walk out the door.

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

#139

It’s been a long time since I payed attention to Reddit drama, but isnt Reddit dominated by maybe a dozen or so power mods that have an enormous amount of influence in what goes on on that site?

No.

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

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the link - I wouldn't have seen that thread had you not brought it up. However, are you implying the original story is being manually supressed? Could it be the discussion there got too heated? There are other factors that determine ranking, see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

YC is a Reddit investor, and dang hasn't chimed in connecting the threads, and the other thread was removed from the homepage. It's suggestive but it doesn't prove anything. The guidelines say that HN moderates its own properties less, but that may not always be true, especially pre IPO.

Does YC still own any stake in Reddit? Didn't Conde Nast acquire 100% back in the day?
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