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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

#351

Post by dmonitor »

rootusrootus wrote: post #273
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You’re insane if you think that is happening in the next decade. Half of moderation is just deciding what kind of content you want on the subreddit. Should discussion be serious or jokey? Memes allowed? Or maybe a joke is being run into the ground and needs to get banned just to keep the memes funny for longtime browsers?

Something like r/SmashBros closing the subreddit for a weekend when the new game launched and funneling new users (ie casual normies) into an alternative subreddit is sometimes the best thing moderators can do, but getting an AI to intuit when/whether to do that would be nigh impossible.

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

#352

Post by kitsunesoba »

PrimeMcFly wrote: post #334
kitsunesoba wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I won't deny that as a possibility, but the majority of my Reddit usage has been during its mobile-dominant era so it's not as if low effort mobile posts are unfamiliar.

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

#353

Post by htrp »

rootusrootus wrote: post #273
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

LLMs for auto moderation would cost significantly more than the labor that the mods put in.

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

#354

Post by CodeWriter23 »

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.

Well, Reddit was built on sock puppets.

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

#355

Post by bogantech »

Timon3 wrote: post #329
bogantech wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't change human nature but you can get mods that don't care about this particular issue and when the next ones cause problems you get rid of them too

> You can't change human nature but you can get mods that don't care about this particular issue Okay, and how will that help you to not get "capricious mods"? > and when the next ones cause problems you get rid of them too And when those ones make problems you get rid of them again? And then again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? Are you starting to see the pro…

There is always going to be people that want to be mods

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

#356

Post by balder1991 »

chongli wrote: post #230
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are valuable only to Reddit for their potential to be monetized. Why are you dismissing this? I don’t understand all of these comments talking about Reddit as if it was 100% free to operate and the only important users are the commenters

Reddit at its core is a utility. A "dumb pipe" operator whose main role is to keep the servers running and pay the bandwidth bills. Yet like so many (internet-based) utilities, they have delusions of grandeur, born out of a sense of entitlement to the incredible value produced by their users. Why did they hire 2000 people? Nothing they have done in the last decade has provided new value to users. If they had simply a…

“But Reddit needs to make money” /s https://mastodon.social/@robotdeathsquad/110543755195398954

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

#357

Post by Timon3 »

bogantech wrote: post #355
Timon3 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't change human nature but you can get mods that don't care about this particular issue Okay, and how will that help you to not get "capricious mods"? > and when the next ones cause problems you get rid of them too And when those ones make problems you get rid of them again? And then again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? And again? Are you starting to see the pro…

There is always going to be people that want to be mods

And you think for those people this doesn't hold true?

> Most of them are doing it because they get off on having a tiny bit of power.

Are you willfully ignoring this point, or do you really think that magically it will work out?

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

#358

Post by BashiBazouk »

lawn wrote: post #12

Translation: Reddit will take a heavier hand and stamp out any behavior they don't like. And the obvious next step is to sell control of subreddits to the highest bidder.

Well, according to: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/reddit-ceo-slams-pro...

"Huffman said, though, that he’d like to see some form of revenue-sharing.

“I would like subreddits to be able to be businesses if they choose,” he said, adding that’s “another conversation, but I think that’s the next frontier of Reddit.”

You may not be far off...

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

#359

Post by pokstad »

isaacremuant wrote: post #343
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.

HN isn’t Reddit. I like HN moderation. I come here for the more niche HN discussions. Reddit is much larger than HN and attracts people from a very wide spectrum. A handful of moderators don’t always do the best job at that scale. Especially for larger subreddits.

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

#360

Post by rich_sasha »

"After blackout". This made me smile.

It is often said that if a product is free then you are not the user, you are the product.

Here it is true, just the wrong way round: users are Reddit's product! And Reddit seems to have totally alienated its product! The product is saying, "go f*k yourself Reddit, we're not backing down".

What is left of Reddit the company after they force their will on the users? No product I would think. Just managers and C-suite.

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