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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

#631

Post by jacquesm »

joshstrange wrote: post #552
jacquesm wrote: post #520

Of course they did. What else did you expect? The thing that I find interesting is that Reddit moderators are apparently not above weaponizing the community but seem to have no idea themselves about how to keep Reddit afloat. Reddit costs a ton of money to run and has never been profitable enough to be default 'alive'. If something doesn't change then Reddit is dead, so from the managements point of view all they've…

> seem to have no idea themselves about how to keep Reddit afloat. That’s just not true, there have been many suggestions from things like cutting the API costs in half (so it’s 10x what Reddit makes instead of 20x), giving developers more time to transition users to higher priced subscriptions, allowing API access with Reddit Gold (or premium, or whatever they call it), etc. Not outright lying about conversations on…

Then maybe you should go and run it.

Making 350 million per year for a site of this magnitude is pocket change because it's revenue not profit and costs are pretty high.

Of course everybody criticizing the team believes they can do a Twitter and run Reddit with 150 people but Reddit is a lot more to a lot more people than Twitter ever was. Those people also probably believe that they can rebuild it in a weekend. Or two.

Cutting API costs in half will not change the amount of noise that is being made because for many $0 would be too much. Agreed about the lying though, that shouldn't have happened and it disqualifies the current leadership. But be careful about making too many assumptions about what it's like to run a property at this scale, costs and labor wise.

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

#632

Post by GartzenDeHaes »

brazzy wrote: post #546
safety1st wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 labo…

> 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. There is absolutely no way they are not aware of this. No, they've made a conscious decision that completely alienating and driving away the parts of the communities which care…

I agree. Judging from r/all, they seem to be chasing tictok. It's an almost entirely auto-play short videos, mostly reposts from tictok.

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

#633

Post by 634636346 »

quetzthecoatl wrote: post #581
cryptoegorophy wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any good alternative? I like hacker news for now that it still got some comments worth reading and interesting articles

be careful for what you wish for. 4chan went from both good and bad at the same time to overwhelmingly bad, eclipsing and later drowning the good due to reddit's initial purge of problematic communities implicitly encouraging them to migrate to communities like 4chan. Reddit fostered and encouraged these communities (it is said that spez was a mod for jailbait subreddit) in the initial days when its aim was to become…

Supposedly Spez was made a mod of that subreddit by a troll who exploited a bug/feature that allowed you to make anyone a mod of your subreddit. However reddit did host that community for years (Spez claimed the creep mods were helpful in flagging cp throughout the site), and it's ironic you mention "problematic" communities migrating to 4chan in the same context, since 4chan takes a much harsher stance on the sexualization of minors than reddit. KiwiFarms even more so.

> You really don't want reddit users here

No one wants reddit users.

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

#635

Post by seydor »

pnt12 wrote: post #629
seydor wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the customers can shut down the company arbitrarily, then what's the point of investing in it? Of course they should make it a rule that mods are not allowed to shut down their main channels. Otherwise, Reddit should IPO and then demand that all users buy a share. Users who don't are deleted. Then let the shareholders-users figure out how to make good on their investment

All companies depend on their customers, that's not a reddit only thing. If Coca-Cola pisses of their customers, they'll go to Pepsi in the blink of an eye.

sure, but they won't break all the vending machines

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

#636

Post by rekoil »

btilly wrote: post #608
golergka wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> Who do you think the existing mods are? People are always stepping up to be mods. Most shouldn't be. The existing mods of successful subreddits are the ones who stepped up, should have been mods, and who demonstrated it by creating a successful community. If you replace those by random wannabe mods, on average the result will be bad.

> on average the result will be bad

And in many cases the results will be catastrophic. In other cases the people stepping up will have no idea what it actually means to moderate the subreddits of the larger sizes, and will subsequently fail.

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

#637

Post by BiteCode_dev »

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…

It's amazing that after 20 years of this, people hasn't yet learned that:

- Corporations are not your friends. - Things changes. - What you put there is their property. - Your free work is their money.

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

#638

Post by joshstrange »

jacquesm wrote: post #631
joshstrange wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> seem to have no idea themselves about how to keep Reddit afloat. That’s just not true, there have been many suggestions from things like cutting the API costs in half (so it’s 10x what Reddit makes instead of 20x), giving developers more time to transition users to higher priced subscriptions, allowing API access with Reddit Gold (or premium, or whatever they call it), etc. Not outright lying about conversations on…

Then maybe you should go and run it. Making 350 million per year for a site of this magnitude is pocket change because it's revenue not profit and costs are pretty high. Of course everybody criticizing the team believes they can do a Twitter and run Reddit with 150 people but Reddit is a lot more to a lot more people than Twitter ever was. Those people also probably believe that they can rebuild it in a weekend. Or t…

I know that the 350M (last reported in 2021 so I think we can assume it’s higher now, at least the same) is revenue but that gets to my second point, headcount and other costs.

Reddit has had not substantially changed in many years. Yes they added chat (I don’t see anyone talking about using this) and NFTs (really? This is what lights a fire under your development team?) but they haven’t really touched the core experience in a very long time. Even “new” Reddit was just a UI refresh, that is still plagued with bugs (I’ve reported a number, all unanswered). The mod tool situation is pretty dire as well and has not been improved despite many broken promises.

What are those ~2K people doing? And Reddit is VERY different from Twitter. The real-time aspect isn’t there, their search has always been shit, and I’m not even sure if you can get notifications when someone posts (just replies to your comment/post). It’s a very different beast. They even can (and do) get away with heavy caching to hide up/down in real-time (I agree with that move, I’m just saying it also affords them the ability to cache). I also regularly get notifications of a reply then go to the thread and the reply doesn’t show up for 1-2 minutes. All that to say I think that Reddit is much easier to run than Twitter and it shouldn’t cost anywhere near $350M with salaries for employees to run.

I’m sure you need a bunch of sales/ad reps but as for the core development team? Judging by their output I find it hard to believe you need more than 10-20 developers, more in ops/production engineer-type role but the development output is next to nil and it’s not like they are spending their time on things like ADA-compliance (which, yes, they don’t HAVE to be accessible).

2000 seems insane, seems very “VC-funded” and I say that with the most negative of connotation. Why can’t anything be just profitable instead having to aim for 1000x returns and all-or-nothing thinking? I know, I know, late stage capitalism, blah, blah, blah, I still hate it.

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

#639

Post by dageshi »

cornholio wrote: post #561
b112 wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This entire thing started, as far as I recall, because the above was NOT being done. You're reading misinformation / misdirection.

And once it had gained momentum, it exploded into a power struggle with the owners of the site. It's now a pure tribal war: the mod tribe will not accept any compromise short of full rollback of the proposed changes, and Reddit cannot do that because - just like all major platforms - it cannot support adblocking alternate clients that are profitable while free riding on their infrastructure. It's also very predictabl…

I take a different view in the sense that reddit has benefitted from the unpaid work of mods for 15+ years.

Mods have generally been either neutral or positive towards reddit as an entity in the past, now... I suspect a lot are asking themselves if continuing to be a mod is worth the effort, at least on reddit itself, I can imagine a lot of them are looking for alternatives or just thinking about giving up altogether.

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

#640

Post by wombat-man »

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…

Well they just had to build out this completely ridiculous chat room feature and the sorta nice looking but slow redesign.
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