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Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

old.reddit.com

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

#141
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're unpaid volunteers. too bad.

I don't think this is controversial at all. In the best interest of the community it makes sense for reddit to step in and appoint new mods that will not try to shutdown the community.

I don't like or agree with the API call costs, but this is how it works. If its not on your server you dont control it. someone else does. in this case is F#cking /u/Spez

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

#142

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 In…

its the death of reddit, just like digg before it. And google circles or whatever it was called its been so long. and myspace and friendster and orkut and aol and msn and Usenet and Dubsmash and vine and literally more sites than Wikipedia fits on one page

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_social_netw...

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

#143

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…

Here's an interesting theory about that. I can't claim any credit for it, it's from Jim Rutt, I heard him on the Clearer Thinking podcast (https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/episode/160/jim-rutt-lar...).

He basically argues that LLMs are going to mean that vast quantities of the content on the internet are going to become automatically-generated drivel which no-one wants to actually read. I think this is pretty plausible. So in order to consume information from the internet, it will basically be a requirement to use an AI tool which, for a given query that you might have, will go out and retrieve all the information on it from many different sources, and return them, appropriately listed and summarised. Such a tool would probably want API access to the likes of Reddit, but would also make the main value prop of the way social media works currently (getting ads in front of eyeballs) useless. So end users will probably end up having to pay for their API use so that their tools can access these sites, and as a pleasant side effect they'll see no ads. So perhaps we'll end up at the promised utopia where users pay a little bit for the content that they like, and don't see ads along the way, as a result of AI. I have no idea how likely this is, but it sounds pretty good to me if it does work out like that.

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

#145
post #60

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 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?

> “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.”

That is some hefty fucking projection from him.

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

#146
post #60

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 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?

Spez is CEO because the board and investors deem him to be the best person for the job. Of course, he founded Reddit, so he has a strong case on merit for why he is the #1 person on the planet to run the company.

The process for selecting moderators is way less meritocratic or democratic than this. They merely got there first, finders keepers. The analogy for landed gentry is accurate.

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

#147
This has pushed me into deleting all three of my reddit accounts. What a disgusting, yet expected move by the CEO. For what little my actions are worth, I will try very hard to void any products that continue to advertise on reddit as well.

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

#148
post #109

Smelled this one coming miles away. Next, they'll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they're dedicated to. Eg. r/starwars to Disney, r/startrek to Viacom/Paramount, etc. Then, old.reddit.com will stop working spontaneously, just like how they toyed with killing mobile browser access to force users to download the app, which they probably will eventually. That's going to be the final push…

If they remove old reddit, I'm done. The "new" reddit UI is literally one of my least favorite things in the world. Filled with clutter and ads, requires too many clicks to see what you want to see, low information density... I could go on.

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

#149

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.

That knife cuts both ways - Reddit hasn't paid anyone to write valuable content for their platform, which means they don't really own the content and it can be taken away.

A lot of people are leaving reddit over this.

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