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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

#341

Post by prepend »

andrewmunsell wrote: post #49
prepend wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t mind it. I moderate some smallish subs (5-10k users) and don’t really make many mod actions. Maybe 5 in the past 15 years. The subs are still pretty good as measured by increasing subscriber counts and my own enjoyment. I think the huge subs probably get a bunch of spam, but then I ignore them even with moderation.

It's more than a spam problem, though: you only have to look as far as Twitter to see that lax moderation that allows toxic or illegal content to exist-- even on a small part of the site-- can begin to drive away advertisers across the whole site, which could turn into a death spiral for Reddit.

I don’t care about that problem.

The cost of running something like Reddit is so cheap. I’ve run bbs servers and it’s not free, but it’s really cheap.

Reddit is just text if you stop hosting images and video.

It was profitable 10 years ago. It just want “unicorn” “profitable” for a huge VC investment and IPO. I don’t care about that.

Again, I’ve literally run subs for over a decade and haven’t seen this problem. Thousands of happy people are chugging along. No “toxic” material so far.

I think the key ingredient may be some niche topic that doesn’t attract random people but some organizing interest.

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

#342

Post by rootusrootus »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #238
P_I_Staker wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will probably have no problem replacing them either. You might have to take a quality dip, at least in theory; In reality it's hard to imagine the mods getting worse. They have a really terrible attitude. It's not just about community relations either, they really, really suck at enforcing rules, so it's not like we're gonna lose quality there. The only reason reddit continues to play nice is to prevent a mass e…

> and I do think it's a problem to embitter, and anger community, even just the mods How about all the Apollo and RiF users? I'm sympathetic and supportive of the mods but I'm angry because at the end of the month the app I've been using for more than a decade will be no longer functional due to choices Reddit is making.

I wonder if Apollo could return as Apollo Premium, with only paid accounts. What fraction of old Apollo users would be willing to subscribe to keep that functionality?

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

#343

Post by isaacremuant »

pokstad wrote: post #124

The fact that a discussion topic has centralized moderation is weird to me. Why should a group of biased imperfect individuals control a topic like r/news? Seems like a ripe area to develop automated moderation using the distinct preferences of each user.

I'm sorry. Do you think HN is unmoderated?

Unless you're in a very free speech leaning place, which are unfortunately and increasingly harder to find, every forum is modded and the mods hold varying degrees of influence.

And the site wide admins, when there's such a thing, hold more.

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

#344

Post by prepend »

Sylamore wrote: post #280
prepend wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I think they sold out to some private equity firm that tore it down, but I guess finds it profitable to repost stuff. I think it sold for $30M so I’m sure the current owners would give it up for pretty cheap.

I wonder who uses it. Maybe it’s just a google seo farm or something (although I’ve never seen it in my results).

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

#345

Post by bhaak »

cragfar wrote: post #296
mintplant wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

There already is a function that gives a subreddit its norms and structure. It's the upvote and downvote tool. Mods should not be shaping a subreddit, that's not moderating.

People only put up with so much bullshit. If you allow the annoying and loud trolls in your subreddit you alienate the more reasonable users that bring in quality content and worse case those quality content moves elsewhere.

What I learned in the last years is that it's misleading that the down- and upvote button is enough. Especially as so many users use the downvote button as "I don't agree with this comment" instead of the intended "this does not belong on this subreddit" and no amount of educating the users help.

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

#346

Post by PrimeMcFly »

deeviant wrote: post #314
runnr_az wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Reddit to talk about local stuff, ultralight gear. The larger world of mods and “power users” and whatnot - not super relevant. I understand how ya’ll feel, but is blocking people from using r/tempe really useful? “I’m gonna make Reddit completely unusable so Reddit doesn’t become shitty”

In a couple weeks, the main way many people use Reddit is going to literally be blocked forever. The alternatives are not palatable to many, so the users are basically being unilaterally banished from Reddit. And that's just the opening salvo to monetize reddit. Give it another year, and your little sub will have 3 ad posts per "actual" post and modded by the Tempe Chamber of Commerce.

> In a couple weeks, the main way many people use Reddit is going to literally be blocked forever.

This is false. Stats showed 3rd party app users were an extreme minority of users.

It's more like mods are a disproportionate number of 3rd party users due to wanting to mod from their phones, and are making the blackout decision for everybody.

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

#347

Post by PrimeMcFly »

cirgue wrote: post #105
sarasasa28 wrote: post #36

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

It is effectively not possible to be a mod of a subreddit without third party apps. I don’t think people fully understand just how awful the native mod suite is for Reddit, and this is what the blackout is really about: the fact that Reddit seems to want to absolutely refuse to support the unpaid labor that makes the site a source of real human knowledge as opposed to a wasteland of bots and trolls.

> It is effectively not possible to be a mod of a subreddit without third party apps.

Nonsense. I mod large subs just fine using toolbox and old reddit. toolbox doesn't counter at as third party app.

It seems most mods want to mod from their phones and will no longer be able to do so.

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

#349

Post by gotorazor »

bogantech wrote: post #90
Y-bar wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do care about the third party apps because they assist moderators in doing their job (which has been done for free as a service to Reddit). And more personally, they provide accessibility support lacking both in the Reddit website and app. I am not a mod, and will literally no longer be able to use Reddit as well as I have had over the last years. The third-party developers have provided Reddit with tremendous valu…

> (which has been done for free as a service to Reddit). Most of them are doing it because they get off on having a tiny bit of power. I couldn't care less about the API or the will of capricious mods - I hope Reddit will hand the subs over to other people

I am a regular user on Reddit and not a mod. But I have managed a very low traffic mailing list before. I cannot imagine doing it for free no matter how much ego boost I get.

So my question is, if Reddit kicks off all the mods from a sub you frequent often, and ask you to be the new mod, would you do it? And, if it is a busy enough subreddit, would you spend the time those people have been spending, to moderation?

For me, that would be no.

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

#350

Post by bhaak »

fullshark wrote: post #199
x86x87 wrote: 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.

And how should that work? Unpaid mods have to do even more subreddit politics than they do already?

How are the users supposed to gauge the work of mods? Most users don't even know the difference between a comment that was removed by the mods or by the user itself and blame it always on the mods, even though Reddit shows it with message (of course not in a clearly understandable way, this is Reddit after all with horrific UI and UX even though users have been complaining for years).

As a mod I often pointed the users to pushshift to see what has been removed so they could see for themselves. Thank you Reddit for taking this clarification from us.

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