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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

#311

Post by Ekaros »

Scalene2 wrote: post #26
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.

Reddit management would do well to understand that with regards to the labour and content they receive for free.

This type of content is always free... For your general audience, there is plenty of enough of it always. And with comments even too much. You never really need to pay monetary value for it.

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

#313

Post by dclowd9901 »

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…

No, I think they just don’t know much about mod influence. Which makes sense: very few people are moderators (because, who would be besides power thirsty basement lords).

The result is they were 1) unprepared for the negative reaction by moderators and 2) woefully blindsided by moderator influence on users and their influence on site control.

Also explains why they have never put any time into developing moderator tooling.

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

#314

Post by imiric »

Simulacra wrote: post #218
spazx wrote: 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.

That would make sense if they wanted to emulate FB, which is questionable in itself, but how they're proceeding with these changes is completely killing the very thing that made them successful in the first place. It's as if the leadership was replaced with people who don't understand Reddit at all.

It's a very dumb move, considering they had all the resources and power to do this right, and still increase their revenue. Now they will increase it momentarily, which will please shareholders, but eventually this will die down as people abandon the platform because it has become a shell of its former self.

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

#315

Post by flarg »

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.

They did pay for it, with free labour.

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

#316

Post by nearbuy »

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…

What information do you want to know about them, and why? Their name? Address? How many children they have?

The main thing I might want to know about them is their history of actions on Reddit. That is who they are - at least as far as we're concerned with respect to their role as a mod.

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

#317

Post by sgarman »

brabel wrote: post #289
Ygg2 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Killing geese that lay Golden Eggs is old and enduring Silicon valley tradition.

Maybe, but in this case there was no golden eggs, Reddit had users but no way of making any money out of it other than by selling the data (which is exactly what they seem to be doing now).

I've seen a lot of companies go far by "selling the dream" instead of actually booking rev. If this continues to go badly reddit won't have rev or a dream. At least with users making content other users want there is always a chance.

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

#319

Post by bredren »

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…

> ... they don’t actually know that much about their own website. That might also explain why they never built out the tooling to begin with.

Its this. It starts at the top:

> Huffman, also a Reddit co-founder, said he plans to pursue changes to Reddit’s moderator removal policy to allow ordinary users to vote moderators out more easily if their decisions aren’t popular. He said the new system would be more democratic and allow a wider set of people to hold moderators accountable. [1]

If he had modded a big sub, like a city sub for example, he'd know that you can't actually moderate toward popular opinion.

Not only because what is popular is not always sustainable. Leadership is doing the right thing even if it is not popular. But on a less obvious level, this wouldn't work because the site doesn't handle the influence of astroturfing and brigading.

To even provide for fair votes would require user abuse administration tools the site clearly does not have.

What a bummer. I've invested a fair amount of time into reddit. It has a lot of useful information. It is a shame it is led by this guy. This whole thing did not need to happen. It seems so common to be let down by leaders of social media companies.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14aeq5j/new_admin...

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