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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

#131

Post by Timon3 »

bogantech wrote: post #90
Y-bar wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do care about the third party apps because they assist moderators in doing their job (which has been done for free as a service to Reddit). And more personally, they provide accessibility support lacking both in the Reddit website and app. I am not a mod, and will literally no longer be able to use Reddit as well as I have had over the last years. The third-party developers have provided Reddit with tremendous valu…

> (which has been done for free as a service to Reddit). Most of them are doing it because they get off on having a tiny bit of power. I couldn't care less about the API or the will of capricious mods - I hope Reddit will hand the subs over to other people

And those new mods are suddenly not going to need better modding tools? They'll just be happy with whatever Reddit has? It's just the current mods who get off on their power, the new ones won't?

Stop for a second and consider: why do these problems exist, and why should they stop?

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

#132

Post by chongli »

lazystar wrote: post #60
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #8

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.

Lurkers are pure consumers, free-riders. They produce nothing. They are valuable only to Reddit for their potential to be monetized.

People like to say that users who post content care about lurkers because they want to be seen/heard. No. People who post content care about commenters (and up/downvoters at the bare minimum) who interact with them in meaningful ways, not lurkers. Lurkers are the cosmic neutrinos of social media: they pass through without leaving a trace.

Reddit wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want millions of hours of unpaid labour from mods, posters, and commenters. And they want to control these people as if they were employees (by dictating what tools they're allowed/not allowed to use). This will not turn out well!

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

#133

Post by Zetobal »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #91
guardiangod wrote: post #64

The difference between Musk/Twitter and spez/Reddit is that the value of Reddit lies in its army of unpaid moderators, and Twitter's value lies in its brand recognition. When Musk took over and pissed off everyone, the only protest the users can do is to leave the platform. Some did but not enough to hurt Twitter. That's because the management (ie modding) is done by Twitter staff already. With a strong brand, Twitte…

>If those moderators leave, Then they will find new ones. As long as Reddit has usecases, as long as the powertrip is worth the lack of ownership and poor tooling, there will be mods willing to moderate subs and feeling powerful and getting drunk off of it. 'Historically', this has happened in every social medium with moderation so far. There's no anarchy here. Most Redditors don't care for the mods in particular. If…

The thing with mods is even if you don't recognize their value shape how a community works. If dang wasn't working on HN it would be a different place would it be better or worse? We don't know. If it's ok for reddit to reshape their communities it's fine to replace them but random mods are not a drop in replacement.

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

#134

Post by BlargMcLarg »

guardiangod wrote: post #111
BlargMcLarg wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If those moderators leave, Then they will find new ones. As long as Reddit has usecases, as long as the powertrip is worth the lack of ownership and poor tooling, there will be mods willing to moderate subs and feeling powerful and getting drunk off of it. 'Historically', this has happened in every social medium with moderation so far. There's no anarchy here. Most Redditors don't care for the mods in particular. If…

>Most Redditors don't care for the mods in particular. Because the current batch of moderation work well enough. Now imagine the current batch leave, and the new ones take over are worse (and they will be worse since Reddit has shown that Reddit has direct control over the Moderators' position safety, if the actions are not aligned with Reddit's CEO. Some reasonable people will not like that.) Eventually the remainin…

Your assumption relies entirely on the difference between new and old being a noticeable, significant bad. Nothing in this story implies noticeable, let alone significant.

Old Reddit to New Reddit was noticeable and growth continued. The push from browser to app was a noticeable bad, an intended one, and Reddit still grew.

You seriously underestimate the passivity of most users. Reddit has, by all regards, truly messed up several times and still went on. It'll become a problem when mod quality is obviously, significantly worse, and no sooner than that.

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

#135

Post by jcranmer »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #112
kitsunesoba wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, lurkers would have nothing to lurk around if it weren't for heavier posters, many of whom use third party apps to paper over the various papercuts of posting with the official site/client.

What do you think it would cost to buy a non insignificant amount Reddit accounts from power users to own their comments and remove them from Reddit? And if Reddit restores them, file DMCA takedowns? Should be cheap, right? With the value of Reddit users being so low? If that is where the value is being generated, that is Reddit's value lynch pin.

> And if Reddit restores them, file DMCA takedowns?

Almost certainly, Reddit's terms of service means you grant them a irrevocable perpetual license to your posts, so a DMCA takedown would be in bad faith.

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

#136

Post by none_to_remain »

The fun part is for me Reddit was pretty much already dead, as these moderators degraded the content over the past several years. I made no big decision to boycott, just subreddits were driven below an interestingness/quality threshold and fell from my browsing, so the only one I've looked at regularly in a couple years is local r/nyc. (which didn't blackout)

I blame the admins to the extent they encouraged and allowed this behavior, but I would say now I'm more hopeful for the future of Reddit than I was two weeks ago. To be clear I still expect failure, but at least they're making some effort at change.

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

#137

Post by htag »

devit wrote: post #69

Well, that's accurate and indeed a major problem. Subreddit moderators, like unfortunately usually moderators everywhere, can act arbitrarily and there is no way for users to remove or punish moderators. So this means that /r/$FOO is not actually a subreddit about $FOO, moderated so that exactly any non-spam discussion about $FOO is allowed, but rather a dictatorship ran by whoever happened to grab the name first. So…

A subreddit is not a dictatorship. Everyone that participates in the subreddit it doing so voluntarily. Your argument that Reddit has a higher authority that can deal with bad moderators just kicks the can. What if the Reddit universal mods abuse their power in the same ways your described?

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

#138

Post by cragfar »

bhaak wrote: post #43

Every day that passes I’m getting more convinced that the best move to improve the likelihood of a successful IPO (which IMHO this whole API clusterfuck is all about) is to fire spez and install a sane CEO. How can it be that he is still in charge and hasn’t been fired years ago?

A sane CEO would instantly ban all the participating mods of the larger subreddits. And then pick off the rest that didn't get the message.

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

#139

Post by toomuchtodo »

jcranmer wrote: post #135
toomuchtodo wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think it would cost to buy a non insignificant amount Reddit accounts from power users to own their comments and remove them from Reddit? And if Reddit restores them, file DMCA takedowns? Should be cheap, right? With the value of Reddit users being so low? If that is where the value is being generated, that is Reddit's value lynch pin.

> And if Reddit restores them, file DMCA takedowns? Almost certainly, Reddit's terms of service means you grant them a irrevocable perpetual license to your posts, so a DMCA takedown would be in bad faith.

There are no material repercussions for bad faith DMCA takedowns, as the evidence has shown [1]. The legal burden still falls on Reddit to triage and action them. With that said, you would want to own the Reddit accounts as IP in an LLC that holds no financial assets to shield you from any liability (not legal advice, we're just having fun talking hypotheticals). You'd own the copyright to the content, let Reddit try to argue in court the requests were bad faith. You didn't agree to the terms when the account changed hands, and you're now the owner.

You wouldn't have to do it forever, only long enough to materially impact Reddit's valuation pre-IPO. This is simply flipping the "ask for forgiveness instead of permission" model of Silicon Valley on its head. Or is that only okay when you're trying to get obnoxiously wealthy off the backs of everyone else?

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

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

#140

Post by arbitrage »

Twirrim wrote: post #94
sarasasa28 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Well, I, for one, don't fucking care about third party apps (which make money mind you) Those third party apps are central to how the entire content works, they're absolutely critical for the moderators that try valiantly to diver the tide of pure excrement of content that floods in to the various subreddits. That content you want to be able to see would be buried and gone, or never put there in the first place if…

> Those third party apps are central to how the entire content works, they're absolutely critical for the moderators

This is simply not true. I moderate several subs. 3rd party mod tools are not critical. Mods who claim this is so are really misrepresenting the issue.

Power tools for mods are nice to have for some. I make use of automod extensively. The tools reddit provides are adequate to perform moderation tasks.

Also, since I guess it needs to be said, I'm not a shill for spez. I don't like the dude, but I'm not a sock puppet. This is all winding up looking like an epic toddler tantrum from a small proportion of the higher-power mod contingent.

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