Reddit: You’re fired!
Mods: We don’t even work here.
Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private
681–690 of 1001 posts
Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private
#682Smelled 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…
r/StarTrek is already surreptitiously controlled by Viacom. Any negativity is immediately shut down. If you want to be critical of Star Trek, you have to rub shoulders with people who got banned from r/startrek because their criticism was that there was too many black people in the new shows.
It’s disgusting.
Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private
#683Earlier quoted context omitted.
You make some good points but if there's one fatal flaw these big tech CEOs and their boards seem to have it's hubris. Reddit doesn't have a moat and it also doesn't have data that's amazingly interesting. This may very well be part of a power play by Huffman but he's forgotten the only two things that really matter at the end of the day, which are quality and volume/scale. Screwing his mods hurts him on both of thos…
> Reddit doesn't have a moat Reddit has a tremendous moat. Like any social network, its users are the moat. Its usability has gotten worse in the past few years but there simply aren't great alternatives. (Federated services like Lemmy are not serious reddit alternatives.)
It's not much of a moat if Reddit hasn't derived a single cent of profit from it.
Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private
#684Earlier 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.
>They merely got there first, finders keepers.
That hasn't really been the case for a while. Especially for the larger subs like r/videos. R/news for example was created 15 years ago and it's oldest mod was modded two years ago. Also the admins come in and remove top mods of problematic subs (generally alt right/brigading subs) all the time.
Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private
#685Smelled 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.
By fine you mean where they are now, still massively unprofitable?
Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private
#686Smelled 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 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?
Lucked out in terms of money in the short term, not so much in terms of finding a good fit.
Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private
#687It’s fun to consider this from his perspective. He has essentially pushed all-in on this and now he has no way of backing out. If this is all about getting ready for IPO, then he can’t back out, because that would show potential future investors that he is not in control of policy changes, and that means that when shareholders want to crank up the money making machine, they can’t. At the same time, he needs to show t…
As a user, all he's done is prove to me that he will cave instantly to shareholder pressure. There aren't even any public shareholders asking for more money now and he's already cranking the money-making lever. How am I to expect the site to become better in the future when infinite growth is expected? Why would I put my time in this site over another?
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Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private
#688Earlier 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…
> (users) will not accept any compromise short of full rollback of the proposed changes, and Reddit cannot do that because it can not support (servicing 3rd party clients)
To be clear, Reddit has had $350+ million dollars in yearly revenue for a few years now, primarily from premium subscriptions and ad revenue (ads that are not, in fact, always blocked by 3rd-party clients -- ads show up in reddit Sync Pro all the time)
They absolutely could roll back everything and be profitable. They're "struggling to profit" because the CEO is literally burning all the money trying to chase an IPO, not because there was ever any fundamental problem with Reddit's cost structure.
Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private
#689Smelled 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…
Did Reddit forget why they were popular in the first place? Remember the Digg redesign? Seems like every Reddit update has been user-hostile in a way that was much worse than the Digg stuff.
Being popular used to pay the bills, in the form of VC financing. The jig is up, now they need to make actual money.
Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private
#690Its been a week now since I deleted reddit. I have 7.5 hours per week back! Amazing move, highly recommend.
14!
I love it. I go for a walk every night now. Its actually a pretty cool world, the big room.