Many subreddits I visit asked users to vote btw.
Reddit CEO Says Mods Too Powerful, Plans to Weaken After Blackout
251–260 of 447 posts
Re: Reddit CEO Says Mods Too Powerful, Plans to Weaken After Blackout
#252Ha. 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.
I don't know. Have people forgotten that reddit mods were almost universally hated before this? It didn't matter if you were a good mod. People would consider you the enemy regardless, so I don't find it strange at all that users take this opportunity to hate on mods.
I think there's some group who's always disliked mods, but I don't think that dislike is necessarily universal.
Speaking personally I've had maybe one or two bad experiences of mods in the ~11 years I've used Reddit, and that time wasn't exactly spent lurking, with my account having accrued ~35k karma.
Re: Reddit CEO Says Mods Too Powerful, Plans to Weaken After Blackout
#253Ha. 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.
It's a pretty common sentiment that opinions that differ from our own must be corrupt, bought, sock-puppets, etc. People on virtually every side of any issue feel this way because it's comforting to imagine that our own opinion is the only authentic one. Loads of reddit users are annoyed by the blackout thing and find the arguments for it unconvincing. I mean personally I think all of the blackout people should just…
I agree with that in principle, but this particular CEO is known for anonymously editing users comments that were critical of him, and reddit itself has a history of creating fake accounts, so in this case both are judged by their past deeds.
Re: Reddit CEO Says Mods Too Powerful, Plans to Weaken After Blackout
#254Every 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.
And the same message would still be sent to every user who cares: whatever value you see here is worthless to us, the owners. You have no stake, and we value your experience only as a source of wealth extraction. A lot of users probably don't care. Others probably think that's a fine and proper thing. For myself, it's a reminder and a warning.
The reminder is that Reddit is a Cthulhu-esque machine and cannot be trusted. Reddit and myself were always ships whose courses had happened to align, I have been warned that they are changing course to one I will not like.
That's all fair enough, but far from admirable. But my takeaway is that the net value of Reddit, to me, is going to be negative for the forseeable future, so my own best course is to block it completely. Others can make their own choices.
Re: Reddit CEO Says Mods Too Powerful, Plans to Weaken After Blackout
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 soc…
Except even just viewing a post leaves a trace, whether a the service chooses to display view counts or not. The webhost knows how much traffic they're getting, and those numbers help them set rates for advertisers.
None of that matters one bit to the average Reddit poster: the person who creates a text post without any links. If any value is captured from that lurker, it all goes straight to Reddit.
Re: Reddit CEO Says Mods Too Powerful, Plans to Weaken After Blackout
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
During this whole debacle, there's been quite a few posts across various parts of the internet that register to me as astroturfing, including a handful on HN. It's not about the opinions presented, nothing wrong with dissent, but the way these posts express those opinions just feels wrong somehow — I've seen 20 years worth of impassioned people posting on the internet, and these posts come off as poor imitations of t…
I agree. The posts here on HN about how all the mods are terrible human beings... that just read as an oddity.
How so? People generally hate reddit mods, for good and bad reasons. The belief that reddit mods are power hungry abusers is ingrained in internet culture so I don't find it strange that this common sentiment is leaking to HN. If anything I find it very surprising that people praise them as heroes now which would have been completely unheard of just a few weeks ago.
Re: Reddit CEO Says Mods Too Powerful, Plans to Weaken After Blackout
#257Mods do whatever they like: "things are fine" Mods hurt potential profits: "mods too powerful, need to act" If the community doesn't like the mods, they can... create a new subreddit with new mods.
> 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
The polls I've seen on subs after the reopened have been largely in favor of continuing the blackout. The community supports this, adding a more direct ability to remove mods is just going to be abused by brigading.
Re: Reddit CEO Says Mods Too Powerful, Plans to Weaken After Blackout
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
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! :)
Obviously, anyone who disagrees with me must be an astroturfer bot.
It's reddit, I'm sure there are people that have spent the last decade on the site posting cat pics, dodgy stock tips and intimate details of their life being accused of being bots for criticising mods.
But if a bunch of new, dormant or unused accounts start promoting the exact party line of an entity which is known to generate accounts on their service to seed stuff, in a battle they're determined to win, the probability of them all being unconnected individual people popping up to express their support for Reddit's management is pretty near zero...
Re: Reddit CEO Says Mods Too Powerful, Plans to Weaken After Blackout
#259Ha. 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.
Why would lurker opinions greatly differ from poster opinions?
Re: Reddit CEO Says Mods Too Powerful, Plans to Weaken After Blackout
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not everyone that disagrees with you is doing so in bad faith. Not everything is brigading, etc. Some of us think that the blackouts are starting to look a lot like a tantrum that doesn't represent the best interests of the community. It is a very one-sided argument, as if the moderators are the reason the community exists. No. Moderators are unnecessary without users. It's a symbiosis.
> Some of us think that the blackouts are starting to look a lot like a tantrum that doesn't represent the best interests of the community. I've yet to seen a single coherent argument that supports this statement. Please enlighten me.
You can read through this thread to find many coherent reasons. They won't necessarily be reasons you personally find persuasive, but that isn't what coherent means. People have different value systems and priorities and therefore they can legitimately conclude different things about the same information. People with whom you cannot find yourself agreeing probably don't share many values and perspectives with you, but that doesn't mean they're being incoherrent. Assuming that anybody who disagrees with you is mentally disabled or a bot is a pernicious redditism.