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

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201–210 of 447 posts

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

#201
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…

I wouldn't classify it as a major problem but as a failure of the system itself. If the system was self moderating, then you wouldn't even need mods.

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

#202
The funny aspect of all this is how the whole conflict is being feeded by inverse psychology. Mods want to help Reddit notice that the new APIs fees are too high and will harm Reddit itself, to which Reddit could have set very low fees and then slightly increase them until they get a balance between users vs earnings. Instead they followed Musk's gonna-kick-your-ass ways.

Will 2023 be considered the year of the Great Social Media Purge?

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

#203

There goes reddit. No one wants an unmoderated slop.

Some of them go waaaay too far. Mass purges of disagreement/dissent have become normal on there, but they're now going after 'prethoughtcrime' - banning anybody who's ever posted to any of a growing list of subreddits deemed 'bad'.

On the surface that seems like a bad idea but get enough users coming in from another sub and "just asking the question" or not arguing in good faith and you'll understand really quick why it's easier to ban them all than play games where they try to stay just barely on this side of the rules while still harassing your community. You also get a lot of the "I'm a gay black guy [0]"-type people which makes modding even harder.

I understand how on the outside it looks bad but I also know from experience what mods put up with and I totally understand reaching for this tool to avoid it.

[0] https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/11/10/21559458/dean-brown...

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

#204
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?

Do you disagree with him here? Mods are too powerful, many have decided to try and murder the site because of something most users don't even care about. The idea that because I volunteered to moderate r/subcultureX for a few years I can make sure www.reddit.com/r/subcultureX can never direct to any content forever is ridiculous.

Maybe for some definitions of "don't care" most users "don't care" about being forced to use a broken app with a terrible user experience. But I guarantee you almost every user would like to have a better UX than the official Reddit app offers.

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

#205
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

Yet still a significant portion of comments come from third party app users. Reddit wants to control how I post my likely close to 1000 comments a year, I just won't comment then. The content doesn't come out of this air, it comes from a handful of power users that are far more likely to use third party apps.

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

#206
post #22

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

Agreed. Just my opinion: most mods I've encountered seem like smarmy, smug, and sanctimonious petty tyrants who need to touch grass.

Reminds me of r/philadelphia which was one point was modded by Europeans who didn't understand the city's roots.

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

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the community doesn't like the mods, they can... create a new subreddit with new mods. If mods are going to permanently set subs private then they should be seized and given to someone who will use it

Why not just create a new subreddit? Eg. /r/gaming became a meme ridden shitshow and someone made /r/games which bans memes and it's great. No need to seize anything. Let people go where they want.

Majority of users will not know about the new subreddit and simply be annoyed that the subreddit they visited for years is suddenly missing.

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

#208
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?

> 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.

Spez’s PR moves aren’t great, but it’s unrealistic to expect a new CEO to go easier on API costs.

If anything, a new CEO would make more of a push toward monetization. Reddit has been very light handed about monetization, charging, and tolerating ad blocking. Bring in a new CEO, chosen by the board, and it would likely be a full on squeeze toward making money even if it costs them a vocal minority of users.

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

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> delete your comments Given reddit is apparently restoring deleted comments, that's going to be a useless gesture.[1] I agree with the sentiment though; if people en masse migrated away from Reddit the way they did with Digg, that would be the only really impactful long-term gesture. Edit: Regarding the sockpuppet thing, I mean, we've literally seen that happen a number of times. When you see an account created in 2…

I've been exploring the fediverse options like kbin and lemmy and I just don't see it. Maybe someone can explain. If one lemmy instance has a really popular community, say "Memes" how can that scale? There could be millions of posts and terabytes of data. Then if multiple lemmy instances have their own "Memes" communities, that's balkanized and a user would have to subscribe to each instances "Memes" community? Or ar…

I assume there'd be a limit on the number of popular communities each server can handle. CommunityA@ServerB and CommunityC@ServerD can grow separately and you could participate in both.

If you had CommunityA at both, eventually everyone might migrate to ServerB; but then there's more room on ServerD for other communities.

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