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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

#211
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…

Yes, and they seem to be absolutely 100% unaccountable.

Various mods have gotten plenty of heat over the years, like being grilled by andersen on CNN

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

#212
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…

They are done, 100%, this is the turning point and it's all downhill from here.

They depend fundamentally on volunteer labor and every decision they've made since announcing the API change has alienated that labor. The morale of every mod I know is in the tank.

The solution for this was incredibly simple. Reddit you want to charge for the API? Go right ahead, we all want you to make money.

But when the volunteer labor you need in order to function started complaining because this is going to kill the modding tools they need - you should have immediately, like next day, apologized for the oversight and promised free API credits to them until you sort this out.

This whole conflict could have been nipped in the bud, people would have grumbled a bit, but as long as Reddit got their act together in terms of tooling eventually, life would have gone on, and Reddit would have had their payday too (I doubt milking mods for spare change is the master plan here).

Instead Reddit decided to escalate. Declare war on the people who make their service possible. It was the dumbest possible move they could make for their business. The decision makers behind this must operate in one hell of an echo chamber.

This is the end, it's all downhill from here, I doubt they can recover.

Needless to say I'll avoid their IPO like the plague and so will many others.

10 years from now something else will have come along and replaced them and we'll all look back at this moment.

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

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lemmy: https://join-lemmy.org/

Are these servers like subreddits, or more like email providers? Is there a "see all, interact with all, no restrictions" lemmy server? Help! :)

That's kind of the thing about the fediverse: that's basically not possible. Any instance that doesn't engage in some blocking will probably be blocked for what it doesn't block. You could, of course, run your own instance, but obviously that's its own can of worms.

So... It's tricky.

edit: also, sites like joinmastodon USUALLY just completely exclude anything too controversial, for pretty obvious reasons. Dunno about join-lemmy but I'd bet on it.

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

#214

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…

Reddit is trying to flip loss to profit. They have a wealth of data for AI models and AI is going to be big. They are trying to cash in on it.

What they should have done was make a free model for general API use like most companies to develop against.

And after that tier the model accordingly. Data is expensive, even though it is getting cheaper per byte we are producing more of it per volume.

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

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead of exposing identification I rather have moderators be subject to yearly votes. The would just create a brigading problem. Political subs could encourage their members to join lists of hundreds of subreddits and all vote for picked candidates. Coordination could happen on some other site as well.

I thought of a similar issue. It could be limited to active high karma participants of the community, however anyone can game that with GPT powered bots. Another possibility is to have yearly oustings instead of voting mods in. At 90% disapproval mods get kicked out. This along with brigading detection should cover damage by bad actors for the most part.

Oh yeah, GPT pretty much ruins that. You don't even need humans to brigade now, you just need a bot army. The AI future is going to be amazing...

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

#216
Personally, I couldn't care less about Reddit itself, but what's really annoying is that half of my Google searches end up in temporarily closed subreddits.

Reddit has become some sort of a Stack Overflow lately - I hope all that knowledge will be moved somewhere else.

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

#217
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…

Facebook and Twitter are not bot ridden ghost towns... but anyways, I'll make the opposite prediction: Reddit is going to turn out just fine and this episode will quickly become a memory from the past.

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

#218
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…

I think Reddit is financially unstable and they are doing this to try to become like Facebook, etc. In other words, financially stable. It's a company, if people stop buying the product it will fold like any other company. Time will tell.

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

#219
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current de-federation stuff is already bringing out extreme toxicity and personal attacks.

Why is this bad? Isn't it represantitive of real life? There's no such thing as a safe space, only a strong mind.

> Everything feels small and jovial.

From the comment I replied to. People getting up in their arms and attacking others for no good reason does not seem very jovial. It seems dumb, childish, and immature, which yes, is what I expect from a random sampling of people.

I don’t want safe spaces, I simply prefer to surround myself with people not being idiots and assholes, it makes life far more relaxing.

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

#220

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…

The CEO is explicitly saying this change has to do with the ChatGPT's and such.

>But with artificial intelligence-powered large language models like Microsoft-backed ChatGPT and Google's Bard, a massive corpus of conversations is being hoovered up. And in return, Reddit receives very little, he said.

https://www.npr.org/2023/06/15/1182457366/reddit-ceo-steve-h...

And this isn't the first time they've said this.

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