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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

#241

Post by George83728 »

0xDEF wrote: post #72
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.

Americans (and terminally online Europeans) have a hard time understanding that people outside their social bubbles can disagree with them without being sockpuppet accounts or bots.

> Americans (and terminally online Europeans)

I think this is characteristic not of Americans and not even of terminally online Europeans, but rather of reddit users specifically (and heavy users of other systems that operate similar to reddit, or which had very biased moderation for a long time but no longer do, such as twitter.) Reddit is all about forming the illusion of overwhelming consensus; an opinion shared by 49% of users can be ruthlessly suppressed by the 51%, downvoted below zero and hidden from view. The fundamental nature of reddit's comment system encourages this warped perception of people who disagree with you being unreal.

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

#242

Post by riku_iki »

chongli wrote: post #196
riku_iki wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are valuable only to Reddit for their potential to be monetized. yes, and fund service running. Looks like important part of the ecosystem.

Only for a centralized, corporate-owned system like Reddit. A volunteer-owned fediverse system can monetize via donations, Patreon-style. This changes the incentive structure: making the administrators accountable to the most invested people (power users).

> A volunteer-owned fediverse system can monetize via donations, Patreon-style

does it exist and works on scale, or it is like communism where everyone will be happy, but it is never achievable and sustainable just because most of the people want money, power and free stuff.

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

#244

Post by arbitrage »

andrewmunsell wrote: post #49
prepend wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t mind it. I moderate some smallish subs (5-10k users) and don’t really make many mod actions. Maybe 5 in the past 15 years. The subs are still pretty good as measured by increasing subscriber counts and my own enjoyment. I think the huge subs probably get a bunch of spam, but then I ignore them even with moderation.

It's more than a spam problem, though: you only have to look as far as Twitter to see that lax moderation that allows toxic or illegal content to exist-- even on a small part of the site-- can begin to drive away advertisers across the whole site, which could turn into a death spiral for Reddit.

Oh no, won't someone think of the advertisers!?

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

#245

Post by whywhywhywhy »

shmatt wrote: post #141
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…

except you don't need to be born a chosen one to become a mod. its not rocket science, and plenty of people want the power have you every thought to yourself, wow, /r/pics is so much better since /u/DM_ME_BOOGERS joined the mod team, I really feel like there was a pre-2019 /r/pics and a post-2019 /r/pics People don't even notice that mod teams could have completely rotated out this year and they didn't feel a thing e…

They definitely notice if there is a bad mod throwing their weight around.

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

#246

Post by jackdh »

DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #52
bpodgursky wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 user…

Which doesn't make sense as instead of voting people out they could just create a new subreddit. Unlike in real life landed gentry works due to limited space. Not so on the internet.

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

#247

Post by sebstefan »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #232

Ignoring the elephant and engaging with the premise: "More democracy" seems like a good thing, as long as it is balanced. There should be some recourse for a mod that actually enforces the rules of the sub (like removing political messages from subs that have rules against those sorts of things). I don't know how you'd do that on Reddit. All mods in a sub can vote to veto? That seems like they'd still have too much p…

Whichever way he does that, the first thing people are going to do with it is fire the mods he just put in place to stop the blackouts

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

#248

Post by canadaduane »

bheadmaster wrote: post #95
pier25 wrote: post #18

Reddit wouldn't be what it is without mods. Good luck finding people that will work for free without a sense of ownership.

There is a plenty of power hungry basement dwellers who crave any kind of authority. Mods are literally the worst aspect of Reddit. Good riddance.

This seems unbalanced. You're right, but also overlook the superior quality that good mods bring.

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

#249

Post by hinkley »

buildbot wrote: post #58
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.

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! :)

Spez has been caught editing comments from real users.

He should have been fired for that

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