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Reddit CEO Says Mods Too Powerful, Plans to Weaken After Blackout

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Re: Reddit CEO Says Mods Too Powerful, Plans to Weaken After Blackout

#52

I take it users will be able to vote out Admins and the CEO as well?

Why should the users have any vote over anything?

To actually answer: Huffman's argument is that mods are like business executives and users are like shareholders, and therefore the users should be able to vote out moderators who are not acting in the users' best interests. He said this while also implying that the blackout was only supported by moderators, not by the regular users, and that this means that Reddit administration is having to step in to save the users from the evil, sinister "inactive" moderators who enacted the protest.

Since Huffman thinks moderators should be able to be voted out by users because the users are the primary "shareholders" of Reddit, the parent comment to yours is asking (rhetorically) whether they will extend those policies to the CEO and other administrators.

Re: Reddit CEO Says Mods Too Powerful, Plans to Weaken After Blackout

#53

Good riddance. The moderators are the worst part of Reddit. Just pay someone to do their job.

In addition to the issues everyone else has pointed out, unpaid volunteer mods give Reddit a lot of deniability.

If they switched to paid mods, they'd become much more strict on what content and opinions they allow, because to advertisers, things would switch from "reddit allows communities to moderate themselves and can't be expected to catch everything we don't like", where reddit can still get away with some amount of unfriendly content as long as it doesn't get too prominent, to "it's reddit's job to make sure that all content is advertiser friendly".

Similarly, if you have paid mods, what does that mean for subreddits which have the same topic, but were split over moderation disagreements? With volunteer mods that doesn't really matter to reddit, but if the mods cost reddit money, they'll want subs on the same topic to be consolidated, creating further friction and destroying communities.

Re: Reddit CEO Says Mods Too Powerful, Plans to Weaken After Blackout

#54

Good riddance. The moderators are the worst part of Reddit. Just pay someone to do their job.

I like how you think Reddit has the spare capital to hire mods. VCs are running for the door (that’s why it’s an IPO) and index fund retail investors will be left holding the bag.

Re: Reddit CEO Says Mods Too Powerful, Plans to Weaken After Blackout

#55
post #19

Welcome to do all the moderating yourself Huffman. It's the task that all other social networks are constantly struggling with and coming up against laws and regulations, while Reddit had it somewhat figured out, or at least had some systems in place that are better than automated blanked removal. Way to shoot yourself in the foot.

> Welcome to do all the moderating yourself Huffman

This is obviously the endgame. I don’t even think it would be that expensive.

Re: Reddit CEO Says Mods Too Powerful, Plans to Weaken After Blackout

#56

Ha. There were some weird posts from new users in subreddits I frequent. 'we need to rise up against the mods the blackout is an outrage!' It was met with unanimous wtf is wrong with you, go outside. I get the feeling spez is creating new accounts and posting as them again.

Well, I, for one, don't fucking care about third party apps (which make money mind you) Reddit is/was my first source of real human information for a lot of stuff (since google is unusable now). And this blackout was really a pain in the ass

It is pretty much impossible to protest without annoying anybody, and it isn’t as if they are out there blocking ambulances or something.

Re: Reddit CEO Says Mods Too Powerful, Plans to Weaken After Blackout

#58

Ha. There were some weird posts from new users in subreddits I frequent. 'we need to rise up against the mods the blackout is an outrage!' It was met with unanimous wtf is wrong with you, go outside. I get the feeling spez is creating new accounts and posting as them again.

Yeah before I deleted my accounts yesterday, the rate of weird pro-reddit admin comments was getting pretty high. It would not surprise me at all if they are trying to game the numbers more before their IPO, so they can claim they made the right decision.

Investors: do you due diligence! Reddit has used fake accounts in the past! :)

Re: Reddit CEO Says Mods Too Powerful, Plans to Weaken After Blackout

#59
Honestly, if mods can just be voted out by their community, it will be chaos and little noisy groups of people will ruin everything.

I am thinking this is not so much a well thought out and reasoned opinion after weighing up historical behaviour on the platform, but a whiplash to a protest actually having effect. Just maybe...

Re: Reddit CEO Says Mods Too Powerful, Plans to Weaken After Blackout

#60

Ha. There were some weird posts from new users in subreddits I frequent. 'we need to rise up against the mods the blackout is an outrage!' It was met with unanimous wtf is wrong with you, go outside. I get the feeling spez is creating new accounts and posting as them again.

There's a silent majority - "lurkers" - that the mods have completely ignored over the course of their tantrum. I've commented more in the past few days than i have in the past few months, because it's obvious the mods have completely lost perspective of the average user experience.
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