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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

#431

Post by golergka »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #398
andrewinardeer wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with your doomsday scenario. There are Reddit users waiting in the wings, wringing their hands ready to jump at the 'oppurtunity' to moderate established subreddits and will happily devote their time to custodial duties. No doubt some have already contacted Reddit management saying that if they de-mod x subreddit they will jump in and guarantee the subreddit's operation. I don't understand the argument abo…

> There are Reddit users waiting in the wings, wringing their hands ready to jump at the 'oppurtunity' to moderate established subreddits and will happily devote their time to custodial duties. (...) There are people who thrive on having power over others even though in this case, subreddit moderation, it is perceived power. Yes. Those are the very people who should be never ever allowed to become mods, or to be anyw…

> Yes. Those are the very people who should be never ever allowed to become mods, or to be anywhere near any position of power.

Who do you think the existing mods are?

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

#432

Post by Lutzb »

Llamamoe wrote: post #163
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 they had to do was make showing ads part of the ToS for developing third party apps, to require login for API access, and make only mass scraping require $$$.

Fully agree:

First exempt personal paid premium accounts from the api limitations & ads. Then the goal is to benefit from the already existing and thriving 3rd party app ecosystem. Make your API serve ads in non-premium API calls and profit share the ad revenue with 3rd party app developers. Optionally allow 3rd party apps to remove ads (paid API calls) and show their own ads, however make your ads more attractive & lucrative for 3rd party developers.

In the future I would also like to see that subreddits can gain control of the ads shown in their subreddits (subreddits already understand their audience far better than reddit corporate ever will). Then eventually profit share with moderator teams and content submitter, basically copy youtubes model to incentivize content submitters & good moderation.

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

#433

Post by mrpopo »

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.

Wikipedia is free, Linux is free, walking by the river is free.

Why do people insist we must pay for nice things?

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

#434

Post by bondolo »

I'm a reddit moderator of subs both enormous and tiny. I've been frustrated for years by the core subs being taken over by various cabals of power users. Some like the power, some do it to push a particular agenda, and I am pretty sure some are doing it for financial gain.

Reddit has been hands off (which is why /r/trees is not about trees) and made things worse (which is why mods of top subs is so concentrated among a small group).

This is a turn for the much, much worse. I imagine that this will result in even tighter consolidation of moderation of the big subs in an even smaller set of people with a stronger devil's bargain between them. It is going to devolve in to reddit and "pro"-moderators simultaneously loathing, sabotaging and undermining each other and depending on each other at the same time.

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

#435

Post by pdevr »

posguy wrote: post #387
bsimpson wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird to see Aaron Swartz evoked as some sort of martyr vis a vis Reddit. (You're not the first person to do it.) As I understand, he basically lucked out when his thing crashed and YC asked Reddit to make him part of the founding team. Was he ever a significant part of Reddit?

Considering he was a major force driving the rewrite of Reddit from Lisp (the version that HN is based on currently) to Python, adding features like Markdown support (a language he helped create in 2002), Aaron defined major parts of the site that have persisted across multiple rewrites of Reddit's codebase.

The amazing part is (as far as I remember) that both were implemented[1] as single files[2][3].

[1] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20060213215829/http://webpy.org/...

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20060106081029/http://webpy.org/...

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

#436

Post by Panzer04 »

brabel wrote: post #372
Panzer04 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is a forum. It should not be hard to make money selling ads on the most popular forum on the internet. Hosting costs should be jack shit, developing costs should be pretty low, etc. Reddit must be funking up in a pretty fundamental way to not be making money.

Easy to say from the outside, isn't it? You think they just never thought of that...

It is easy to say from the outside.. but everyone else seems to make it work.

What makes reddit so special it shouldn't be able to afford to pay for itself? It doesn't make sense. Every social media company with this kind of massive userbase appears to be able to make good money, why not reddit?

Sure, maybe they cant make Facebook levels of cash - but 10th most visited website, with what should be low hosting costs (mostly text), should be more than sufficient. If they can't make it work, they'd need good reason to explain what makes them different, IMO.

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

#437

Post by yreg »

rswail wrote: post #155
wnevets wrote: post #100

I just would like to thank the CEOs of Twitter and Reddit for helping to kill my doom scrolling addiction.

I will miss using Apollo, which is one of the best apps on my phone. It works well, complies with all of Apple's HIG rules, and is supported by an enthusiastic and communicative developer. Reddit management are incompetent fools that are looking for the VC cashout of an IPO before the site goes to shit. Cory Doctorow's concept of "enshittification" continues to become more and more prescient of the last few years of…

Apollo followed Apple design language better than the first party apps.

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

#438

Post by pndy »

spazx wrote: post #183
uejfiweun wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

New reddit is the worst. Who even designed it? Every time I accidentally find myself on new reddit UI, I feel like I'm looking through foggy glasses. Over the course of about 20 seconds, I blindly click around, feeling lost and confused, then frustrated, and then I just add "old" to the URL.

Probably it was created by someone who prefer mobile environments and who also believe that bulky big interfaces are good. New design seems to be aiming at keeping users engaged with the site all the time by obstructing visibility of comments, for example

Yesterday I saw a thread on tildes where some new user presented changes to the site via custom style which introduces rounded corners and big elements all around: https://tildes.net/~tildes/16cl/i_made_a_thing_to_make_tilde...

Guess it's the generation gap - those who were growing up with mobile devices are fond of similar interfaces and that's what reddit tried to exploit

I'm on the opposite side: I prefer minimal interfaces, like old reddit, hn or current tildes. Lemmy seems to be more "modern" on that aspect

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

#440

Post by George83728 »

malermeister wrote: post #276
rjvir wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 board and the investors are not the community though. The community is reddit users , which didn't get to democratically pick him at all. He's there because rich folks, e.g. actual landed gentry decided he should be, not because the users chose him to lead. This is democratic in the same way the prince electors system of the HRE was, ie not at all.

Spez is the King, appointed by God (the board). The mods are landed gentry, who rule small fiefdoms (subreddits) at the pleasure of the King. The King doesn't pay them, but as long as they don't upset the King they're allowed to abuse the commoners (arbitrary bans, etc) and extract profit from them (sell out to companies that want control over the moderation of subreddits.)

> The community is reddit users, which didn't get to democratically pick him at all.

You were expecting democracy? From an analogy about feudalism?

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