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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

#331

Post by denton-scratch »

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…

> plenty of people want the power

Is this really true? I'm not a redditor, but I used to co-moderate a certain open-posting newswire. It takes time and thought to moderate; there's no rush from the "power". Nobody thanks you for doing it; you know you're doing it OK if the users don't flee, and nobody's complaining (much).

Admittedly we were all grown-ups, not 12-year-olds; but surely a sub that's moderated by an opinionated tyrant would quickly lose users?

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

#332

Post by bheadmaster »

canadaduane wrote: post #248
bheadmaster wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm sure Hitler brought a lot of jobs and built a lot of quality infrastructure. Is saying the world is better off without him unbalanced because of that?

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

#333

Post by oispakaljaa »

lazystar wrote: post #60
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.

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 identify as a lurker although I've made occasional posts and comments. I don't see how the mods are the problem here. Third part apps go, I go. It's that simple.

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

#334

Post by PrimeMcFly »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #68
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.

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…

You're probably used to desktop users. Most people seem to use their phones to interact nowadays, and the quality of content is lower as a result.

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

#335

Post by PrimeMcFly »

lamontcg wrote: post #311
slowmovintarget wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. The posts here on HN about how all the mods are terrible human beings... that just read as an oddity.

Nah those are real. People with a big "I dropped an r-bomb on a leftist sub and the powertripping mods banned me" energy.

More like "I disagreed with a user I didn't realize was a mod and they banned me".

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

#336

Post by bhaak »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #208
bhaak wrote: 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?

> 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. Spez’s PR moves aren’t great, but it’s unrealistic to expect a new CEO to go easier on API costs. If anything, a new CEO would make more of a push toward monetization. Reddit has been very light handed about monetization, charging, a…

It's not that everybody wants the API to be free. Like couple it with Reddit Premium and rate-limit the hell out of free usage.

Even the Apollo dev said that he might have been able to pass down the ridiculous price tag down to his users. But not on such short notice, especially after been told earlier this year that no change in API usage would coming this year.

This is just bad management and now really bad PR. I can't see that this is good for the IPO. Who in their right mind will throw money at this site now?

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

#337

Post by denton-scratch »

nmz wrote: post #201
devit wrote: post #69

Well, that's accurate and indeed a major problem. Subreddit moderators, like unfortunately usually moderators everywhere, can act arbitrarily and there is no way for users to remove or punish moderators. So this means that /r/$FOO is not actually a subreddit about $FOO, moderated so that exactly any non-spam discussion about $FOO is allowed, but rather a dictatorship ran by whoever happened to grab the name first. So…

I wouldn't classify it as a major problem but as a failure of the system itself. If the system was self moderating, then you wouldn't even need mods.

If you've devised a system for running a self-moderating forum at scale, then I might be interested in shares in your business.

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

#338

Post by prepend »

dotnet00 wrote: post #85
prepend wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> preventing it from degenerating into an echo chamber like truth-social I can’t compare to truth-social as Ive never used it. But big subs like /r/politics are definitely echo chambers and I think they are that way because the mods like it that way.

It's even less likely that paid mods would change that though, they'd only make it worse because they'd only want to stick to a very narrow set of "safe" advertiser friendly opinions, just like most other social media.

Definitely. I think communities are more effective when the “elders” volunteer out of love to run. I don’t think you can pay people enough to make up for passion.

This is based on experiences with community centers, game meetups, marathon planners, and dev communities. You usually have to have someone on the payroll, but having a high ratio of volunteers usually means higher quality community.

My most clear example is the difference between hiking meetups that are just some people planning stuff vs the ones planned by REI. The REI ones are pretty fun, but the meetups are more thought out and better, I think.

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

#339

Post by bhaak »

procarch2019 wrote: post #220
fullshark wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just putting this out there because I guess I don’t know, but is it possible that most users don’t care *yet*. Isn’t it possible that the API changes could have a direct impact on the content or commenting?

From personal experience I can tell you that pushshift being cut off has impacted my ability to mod. I often looked up suspicious users and seeing what they wrote in other subreddits helped me decide if they were worth the risk of a second chance or if it was less of a hassle to ban them. Especially their deleted or removed comments were often quite enlightening. That's not something Reddit enabled me to do.

I could have worked around it. I started archiving thematically similar subreddits myself but it is something that I gladly outsourced and have paid money for instead of doing it myself in an half assed way. And I am a programmer, so I can do such things. Lots of other mods aren't and can't do similar things.

Expect lower quality modding (some people will LOL and ask 'even lower?') because of this changes.

That I had to pay a 3rd party instead of Reddit is not the fault of the 3rd party. They provided a service that Reddit never did.

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

#340

Post by isaacremuant »

nextmove wrote: post #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.

Please go read about the problem before commenting a stramwan. Rarely anyone objects about the API having a price.
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