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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

#221

Post by krainboltgreene »

lamontcg wrote: post #173
tester457 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? It doesn't bother me one bit. If the community is that big a company should fork over cash and pay employees to moderate it instead, or keep an eye on the volunteer moderators for any suspicious actions. Instead of exposing identification I rather have modera…

> 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.

Okay, and?

It's a subreddit, not presidential nomination.

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

#222

Post by HlessClaudesman »

Loveaway wrote: post #128

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…

All this suffering so some jackass can get his third comma.

Reddit would be better for everyone as an open source nonprofit.

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

#223

Post by mozman »

tester457 wrote: post #192
lamontcg wrote: post #173

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.

Any formula you can imagine will be gamed

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

#224

Post by beloch »

rjvir wrote: post #178
beloch wrote: post #112

Reddit might be able to force mods to keep their subs open, but there's no way to stop volunteers from volunteering somewhere else . Anyone who has ever dreamt of making a reddit competitor, but didn't because reddit is an unstoppable behemoth, should take notice of what's going on. There's a huge opportunity here.

The users of a subreddits drive all the value, not the handful of moderators. If a competitor magically got the support of all the moderators, that wouldn't get them very far.

Who's driving the current protest? Who are the primary users of Apollo? Mods.

Reddit mods are anonymous and completely unaccountable to users. They decide what users see and what they are allowed to say. Their influence should not be underestimated.

If mods defect to another platform en masse, so will a huge proportion of regular users.

Take a look at the first page of /r/all. Reddit's brand has already taken a huge hit over something that will have little short term impact on the majority of users. I don't use Apollo, but this kerfuffle is unavoidable for anyone who uses Reddit even casually became of the mods.

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

#225

Post by Larrikin »

unclekev wrote: post #135
101011 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is this more rigged election without evidence talk? I browse Reddit maybe 20 minutes a week, on the weeks that I think to use it. I'm subscribed to maybe a dozen subs. I voted in favor of the strike in the one sub that was kind of late to asking about the protest and I noticed in time.

I understand the value of the site even if I don't use it that often. It seems to be on the road to death and was hoping that it could be saved.

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

#226

Post by JohnBooty »

rjvir wrote: post #146
mlyle wrote: 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?

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.

    The analogy for landed gentry is accurate.
Land is finite and subreddits are not. You can fork off and make your own subreddit whenever you like

If subreddit mods are landed gentry, then so are open source maintainers.

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

#227

Post by Simulacra »

Scalene2 wrote: post #34

If reddit needed to generate income from api access they should have made a subscription a requirement for individual users to access the api.

Actually that makes a LOT more sense. If a person wants to use an app that connects via an API, let the user pay for it, not the app developer.

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

#228

Post by b800h »

lemming wrote: post #143
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…

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 pl…

And then they'll put ads in the LLM chat stream. "Using texts on neurolinguistic programming and mentalism, find subliminal ways of promoting {product}".

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

#229

Post by dehrmann »

rjvir wrote: post #146
mlyle wrote: 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?

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.

He's the CEO because he was the best person to take over after Ellen Pao resigned. He's the CEO today less because he's the right person, and more because the metrics were moving in the right direction and inertia. He might still be the best person for the job, but it isn't something the board actively reconsiders unless they have a reason to.

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

#230

Post by hn_thrwn »

SirSourdough wrote: post #115
hn_thrwn wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Is this supposed to be some kind of takedown? Why would I care that one of the moderators of a subreddit has a normal, common occupation? That article is so petty it deserves no one’s time.

[flagged]
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