Live data from Hacker News

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

businessinsider.com

281–290 of 447 posts

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

#281
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

R/pics isn't exactly an example of a high quality subreddit. Try the same thing on a subject domain specific sub, where the mods actively police the quality of comments. Askscience for example.

/r/spacex is a pretty well oiled machine by the mods.

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

#283

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.

Should you rather care about the lurkers that provide no value to the community, or to the users that actually post something and make reddit reddit? For me the answer is clear. The first party app/website is terrible, riddled with annoying UX and dark patterns. Also, I still want 18+ content on Reddit!

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

#284
Why is everyone ok with ChatGPT scraping Reddit's data and selling it back to you for a $20/mo subscription, but cringe at the thought of Reddit making a profit from their API?

If anything the users creating the content should be the ones being paid.

Your neural nets (which are not intelligence) and 3rd party apps wouldn't work at all if normal people didn't take their time to post useful content.

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

#285
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does this mean that instances that happen to have the popular communities gets hosed on hosting costs? Or stop submissions? Meanwhile "CommunityA" on other instances starve for content and subscribes. If that's true, communities should be federated as well. Like a user should be able to subscribe to "CommunityA" and get that content from all instances who have a "CommunityA".

Or is that totally off?

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

#286
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lurkers should also realize that their experience is shaped by mods decisions. For the better or for the worst, that's a good question, I guess we will soon find out. But given what FB groups look like, I have my own opinion.

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.

Reddit admins could automate the reposting of old content from years ago, complete with comments, and I think most doomscrolling lurkers would never notice.

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

#287
post #94

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 that try valiantly to diver the tide of pure excrement of content that floods in to the various subreddits.

With all respect, that's something we are about to find out.

I find it hard to believe that there are so many people who think that Reddit looked at the mountain of data they have on user and mod behaviour, and API usage, and decided to do the opposite of what that data indicated as a good option.

All the internet posters making the claims you have just made are working blind. They don't have a single iota of actual data to support their conclusions.

Either way, we're about to find out.

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

#288
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I dunno, post on /r/games explaining why there were NOT going to black out is still sitting at 0 upvotes (a in "there is more downvotes than upvotes", with comments asking them to sitting on nice few k's of upvotes which would indicate that even people that never comment downvoted it and want the blackout. The few lurkers coming out of woodwork asking people to allow for enshittification to continue is by definition…

Polls and vote counts can no longer be used to measure subreddit sentiment on this issue. That window closed once the first blackout began, which thrust low-information members into a situation where it looks like the subreddit suddenly shut down. The majority of redditors have no idea where their subreddits disappeared to, why, or when they will be back. Therefore, they can't participate in any votes.

All sentiment measurements going forward will skew towards Very Online users following the drama closely, which GP is arguing will ignore a silent majority of the subreddit's actual MAU.

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

#289
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.

Yeah, from the article:

> Researchers from University of Minnesota Twin Cities and Northwestern University estimated in a study last year that the amount of hours worked by mods in 2020 was worth $3.4 million.

That's not a lot. Reddit's annual revenue is ~$500 million.

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

#290

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.

Long time reddit user and I don’t think the blackout is an outrage but do think the mods need power stripped from them. They are a bunch of power trippers and if you disagree with what they believe expect to be banned. As long as discussion is polite we should be able to voice whatever we want and currently you can not do that on reddit.
Post reply on HN