Live data from Hacker News

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

businessinsider.com

271–280 of 447 posts

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

#271

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

Can you give me an example of what you search so I can see what unusable you're talking about?

Next time you have a problem with any device you have, or any doubt in general, google and try to get real human feedback instead of having to navigate through dozens of web pages with shitty answers that don't work

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

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 leave Reddit. Delete your accounts, delete your comments, resign as mods. Let the rest of reddit just move on. You're not entitled to the communities or their content. The communities themselves are what make the sub. The same happens when users migrate…

> The communities themselves are what make the sub. The same happens when users migrate from one sub to another or complain.

Yes, the sum of all users are the community, not the mods themselves. Therefore if the community is truly aligned in a consensus to not reopen a sub, it won't matter if the sub is forcibly reopened by a newly installed moderator because the community, the users, won't come back anyway. So there's really nothing to complain about; the community is now dead or moved off reddit and it doesn't matter what reddit does with the subreddit that formerly hosted that community.

Unless of course the community is not nearly so united as claimed. Then maybe most of the community will come back to the subreddit. I think this is probably this is what will happen in most cases. And this is why people are mad about reddit threatening to reopen subreddits; because they don't actually have a community consensus to stop using that subreddit. They rely on the subreddit being locked to force the community's hand, and as soon as that leverage is taken away the community will be free to make a decision which is contrary to their own desires.

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

#273
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.

> I don’t even think it would be that expensive.

Agreed. I'll eat my hat if there aren't a few Reddit engineers working to leverage LLMs to make auto-moderation way more effective. I don't know how soon they'll get to the point of not needing any volunteer moderators, but I won't be surprised if within a year or so they have only professional supervisors for all the popular subreddits.

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

#274
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.

Mods give a subreddit its norms and structure. If you kick out the mod team and forcibly reopen r/subcultureX, you're not getting r/subcultureX back, you're getting something new puppeting around its skin. If users really just wanted to start talking about X again, nothing's stopping them from going and creating r/subcultureX2. You can't force people to continue donating the massive amounts of free labor that made these communities what they were.

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

#275
post #213
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mods seem to think they own the subs they moderate. They do not; the subs belong to the community. Mods do have too much power at the moment. The easiest way to resolve this is to perma ban all the mods of closed subs, then remove the ability for subs to be closed.

Yet every sub poll I've seen after the blackout has been >50% support to continue it. The community wants the blackout.

[deleted]

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

#276

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.

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…

It all depends on context, for example, accounts that are very new and go strongly against the general "consensus" (as much as that shouldn't be a thing) raise suspicions. Some people suspect the use of LLMs on trying to push for consensus and astroturf. Add the name of a fruit to your answer. Hopefully they will find a solution to that conundrum

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

#277
He's right. As much as many mods do a great, fantastic job for free, there are those who abuse their power and the admins have always had no issue with that.

Now that it's affecting them they do, so I hope they improve things even if it isn't for exactly the right reasons.

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

#278

Several subs im subscribed to have asked their users what they want to do: continued closure, closure once a week in protest, or open. They respect what their users want in as democratic a way possible. Mods are what make reddit work well. If a user doesn't like them, it's not like they're held against their will; there are other subs to check out and they can start their own if they want. Spez is trying to handwave…

It depends on the subreddit, some of them really are run by power hungry assholes who will delete posts they disagree with and even ban users for disagreeing.

I've also seen others where mods tolerate "popcorn" threads where prominent posters are allowed to spread rumors and make virulent accusations with no repercussions because these threads are interesting for everybody who's not directly involved.

The only real problem with what spez is proposing is that it's obviously only intended to give Reddit's management a way to oust mods they don't like. If this was proposed in a vacuum I'd welcome more accountability for mods.

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

#279
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nah. there was always a way to remove crappy mods. reddit could and would step in at any point in time. don't mix "there are crappy mods out there" with "all mods are crappy". it's not even close. the reason reddit runs is because of all the unpaid mod labor. reddit should just fucking moderate all subs themselves and after that they can do whatever the fuck they want. what? that's expensive AF and comes with liabili…

They will step in eventually, and they are going to respond to this blackout with a new voting mechanism to replace mods it sounds like. Both seem sensible to me.

To me it sounds like slipping into irrelevance but hey i quit reddit so i have 0 fucks left to give. Gonna grab the popcorn and watch from the side

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

#280
post #20
post #14

can we just have this thing become another Digg and go away already? this is so tedious

I hope Digg is planning a DiggV5 for the reverse migration. It would be pretty funny if Kevin Rose bought Digg back and turned it into something not sucky that let’s people post links and comment on them. This could finally be his chance to make the twitter clone he always wanted.

I was actually surprised to find that digg.com is still around, even though it mostly seems to be a reddit repost site in it's current iteration.
Post reply on HN