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Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

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Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#791

Post by matheusmoreira »

mlyle wrote: post #60
janalsncm wrote: post #31

Reddit could have avoided all of this years ago by building out the tools that moderators claim to need. Instead, they relied on third parties to create them. Doing this would have nullified mods’ strongest justification for protesting. While removing 3rd party apps is certainly annoying for users, mods are what keep the site functioning. The fact that Reddit chose to take this course of action tells me that they don…

The richest part here is where spez refers to moderators as a "landed gentry": https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blacko... “And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.” What does that make spez relative to the constituents in his community?

I can't believe I'm reading this bullshit about democracy and "landed gentry" from a goddamn CEO of an advertising corporation who wants to literally monetize the eyeballs of every human being on his site, people who are only there because those "gentries" keep his site from turning to shit at no cost to him.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#792

Post by LanceH »

marcosdumay wrote: post #784
Loveaway wrote: post #128

This is so sad honestly. Like wtf is going on, no apology, no good will, doubling down on the complete moral suicide of Reddit. To push an app no-one ever liked, you know that, but whatever. No-one likes “new” Reddit either, you know that, but whatever. Who’s even gonna use the site after this? Social media zombie sheeple is all that's going to be left. Congrats on your dumb little site, from the front-page of the In…

> Are you guys starving or what?? The CEO himself have said a few times that they are are not and were never profitable. They can't keep raising money, so yeah, from their POV, it's do something now and bad consequences don't really matter. The thing where he disagree with any thinking human is on what that "something" may be (and about not acting earlier). But the desperation is reasonable.

Some of that disagreement is that Reddit should get paid.

The current blackout fiasco seems to be centered around avoiding all forms of payment to Reddit -- both api charges and ads.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#793

Post by hatsunearu »

goykasi wrote: post #293
Loveaway wrote: post #128

This is so sad honestly. Like wtf is going on, no apology, no good will, doubling down on the complete moral suicide of Reddit. To push an app no-one ever liked, you know that, but whatever. No-one likes “new” Reddit either, you know that, but whatever. Who’s even gonna use the site after this? Social media zombie sheeple is all that's going to be left. Congrats on your dumb little site, from the front-page of the In…

Im not a fan of how reddit is handling the situation, but: > To push an app no-one ever liked, you know that, but whatever. No-one likes “new” Reddit either, you know that, but whatever. Who’s even gonna use the site after this? Is just not true at all unless you have actual stats to back that up. A ton of people disagree with that take. The site has grown a massive amount since the new design was released in 2018. S…

>The users/mods that are pushing this blackout are most definitely in the minority, and they are being disruptive to the greater userbase that clearly doesnt care.

What kind of nonsense is this? How is the blackout messaging received so well with large amounts of upvotes? It's not censorship either--any opposition message that occasionally appears is often voted down into oblivion.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#794

Post by xaqfox »

themoonisachees wrote: post #568
brazzy wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead Reddit decided to escalate. Declare war on the people who make their service possible. It was the dumbest possible move they could make for their business. The decision makers behind this must operate in one hell of an echo chamber. There is absolutely no way they are not aware of this. No, they've made a conscious decision that completely alienating and driving away the parts of the communities which care…

The mistake is that reddit thinks moderators use the API for convenience and not by necessity. Previous protests against reddit didn't last long, because they were against things that fundamentally didn't matter outside of ethics, while this is, especially for moderators, a significant ask for their already unpaid labor. Moderators, emboldened by user support, are on strike because this affects them personally in a b…

I am one of those users who doesn't quite know who to support. I absolutely support the end users generating and consuming the content. There are seemingly regular examples of both, admin and mods abusing these users.

What kind of mod tools do the apps allow that Reddit does not?

I do not know if these are mod tools I would agree are necessary (e.g. bans for repeated spam) or are these tools that I would agree allow mods to abuse their power (e.g. ban users are who mere followers of other subreddits).

Frankly, I fear unofficial mod tools could lead to much worse problems if at least portions of the API are not carefully rate limited. Here I include pricing as a type of rate limiting and this could be Reddit's attempt at reeling in this abuse (even if only for IPO reasons). A particular egregious example of such an abuse would be to download all new users' history of posts to make a race determination and ban a new user because of that. Sure, a mod could do this manually using Reddit's UI, but it would remain more difficult to automate this on a large-scale.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#795

Post by taude »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #488
brabel wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy to say from the outside, isn't it? You think they just never thought of that...

It's easy to correctly say that they're not using 2000 employees to keep the site running. I'm sure they've thought of keeping costs low, and I'm sure they could lower costs by a lot and know it. They choose not to. They're not forced into their current path. But it makes sense when you look at that VC money. Just being profitable would be a failure. Chase billions of revenue or die trying. Or to put it a different w…

I don't think you work in large enough company. Everyone always does this type of napkin math, and then hand waves away a lot of the details. I mean, why does Meta need 70K employees to run three apps?

I'm sure the VCs first playbook was to start cracking down on expenses, since it's typically easier to get results from than improving revenue....

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#796

Post by moi2388 »

taude wrote: post #789
matheusmoreira wrote: post #776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stats? Come on. Reddit pesters every mobile user agent to install their shitty app every time. It's like Google pushing Chrome. How many people install their malware just to stop getting nagged about it? People even say they made reddit web bad on purpose to drive people to the app. Show those users better third party apps with no ads and then ask them which they like more.

Why do you deserve to have no ads? Reddit isn't a community service. I do think that for moderators, they could have some special app to help them do their jobs easier, but for regular users, meh, the ads are easy enough to scroll past, like in other social media outfits. I also don't agree that the mobile app is shitty.

Because ads are worse than cancer. The fact companies are allowed to jam them into your eyeballs without consent is absolutely ludicrous.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#797

Post by marcosdumay »

tialaramex wrote: post #737
pea wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was the old adage for Excel that: - 100% of people view spreadsheets - 10% of people use something like SUM() or similar - 1% of people write VB macros You can create a product which works well for the _average_ viewer, but if it sucks for the 1% of 10% (maybe mods or contributors in this analogy), you're going to create a bad user experience for everyone.

Loads of Excel users aren't really doing "spreadsheets" except in the sense that it's Excel and that's a spreadsheet software, so arguably this is a spreadsheet. The same way arguably if I type this novel into Visio now that's a diagram. Like, is "An Oak Tree" a sculpture? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Oak_Tree For many Excel users it's like computerised graph paper, they can write stuff in boxes, maybe use it to…

The point is that those people wouldn't be using Excel if it didn't support the advanced usage. They would be using some other tool, that supported it.

And yes, even if all they want is to paint some squares by hand.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#798

Post by goykasi »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #776
goykasi wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im not a fan of how reddit is handling the situation, but: > To push an app no-one ever liked, you know that, but whatever. No-one likes “new” Reddit either, you know that, but whatever. Who’s even gonna use the site after this? Is just not true at all unless you have actual stats to back that up. A ton of people disagree with that take. The site has grown a massive amount since the new design was released in 2018. S…

Stats? Come on. Reddit pesters every mobile user agent to install their shitty app every time. It's like Google pushing Chrome. How many people install their malware just to stop getting nagged about it? People even say they made reddit web bad on purpose to drive people to the app. Show those users better third party apps with no ads and then ask them which they like more.

I dont know. All I know is that at least 2.6mil[1] people were pestered into installing the app. And all of them decided to leave a positive review of it. Past that, I wont make any assumptions.

Ive never used it. I rather be using Alien Blue, but the auth stopped working earlier this year. So, I had to start using Apollo.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reddit/id1064216828

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#799

Post by jonesnc »

tolmasky wrote: post #713
goykasi wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im not a fan of how reddit is handling the situation, but: > To push an app no-one ever liked, you know that, but whatever. No-one likes “new” Reddit either, you know that, but whatever. Who’s even gonna use the site after this? Is just not true at all unless you have actual stats to back that up. A ton of people disagree with that take. The site has grown a massive amount since the new design was released in 2018. S…

Full disclosure, I use the main Reddit app. I don't think that I've ever installed a different app. That being said, I think it's actually pretty crazy that Apollo is #10 (in News). It's not clear that being 8 spots higher is that much of an accomplishment considering the site itself is constantly pestering you to install it, and the Reddit app can be used completely for free vs. the Apollo app requiring you to pay (…

> and the Reddit app can be used completely for free vs. the Apollo app requiring you to pay

I've been using Apollo for free for years, you don't need to pay for it.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#800

Post by wombat-man »

Jochim wrote: post #745
wombat-man wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really work in enterprise sales, but I always thought the idea was to lure em in with low prices. Going from free to $2.50 a user?? I also don't totally get why "by user" is how they wanted to charge. Wouldn't charging by request make more sense?

They were charging by request. IIRC the $2.50 figure was arrived at by taking the total number of requests and dividing it by the total number of users.

ah I see. Too high a price then.
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