It's time we start building/switching to a decentralized social network. I'm an experienced product designer who always aiming for the best there is for a human, open to commit to something like that.
Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private
921–930 of 1001 posts
Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private
#922Earlier quoted context omitted.
The CEO of Reddit (and even the management team as a whole) can be fairly treated as a monolithic block. They generally speak with one official voice. There are thousands of reddit moderators, most of whom have never met each other. You cannot possibly generalize across all of them. See also: Comments about "black people", "white people", "tech bros", or any other large group of humans.
I didn't try to generalize. I even said at the end of the post it represented my limited experience.
I'm going to assume you genuinely aren't self-aware, so please don't be offended by this attempt to help.
You lead with this:
> If anyone is thinking they are bigger than they are it's these mods.
This is a textbook generalization, a "blanket statement". The next few sentences attempt to reinforce this generalization. A one-sentence disclaimer at the end doesn't change that.
If you want to talk about your experience with then do that. But please don't project that across .
Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private
#923Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's the CEO because he was the best person to take over after Ellen Pao resigned. He's the CEO today less because he's the right person, and more because the metrics were moving in the right direction and inertia. He might still be the best person for the job, but it isn't something the board actively reconsiders unless they have a reason to.
If I were on the board, I’d be engaged in discussion with my fellow board members right now about whether spez is demonstrating the temperament befitting a good CEO. Even if you think the shit coming out of his mouth to be the right attitude, you have to ask why he’s saying it out loud, abrasively, in public, where it’s only going to make the product less attractive.
how do you think the board (any board) feels about a mod clique that is willing to turn a 2-day blackout into an indefinite closure, possibly followed by indefinite "touch grass tuesdays" or other disruptions to business operations?
you're imagining that the board just sees this disruption and wants it over as quickly as possible, but why do you think they would take that view and not want to solve the disruptions in the long-term by removing specific agitators and generally adding additional checks and oversight to the tools they used for their disruption so that it doesn't happen again in the future?
no business is going to let the union sit on the factory floor and disrupt operations - you can strike at the gate all you want, but private property is private property. And when mods end up talking about permanent ongoing intermittent disruption of operations ("touch grass tuesdays") there's not a single board member who is even going to negotiate with that as a potential possibility hanging over their heads. No, you're gone, this is their site and you're being a nuisance.
And this is the point where people start babbling about how mods are irreplaceable and they'd all walk away and leave reddit in the lurch, but it turns out a lot of mods actually just want to get back to it and are being overruled. Let alone if the mod clique was opened up for new membership within their communities - there is inevitably a flood of new applications whenever it's opened. People love being able to push buttons at people, it's a tiny bit of power and that's all it takes.
https://old.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/149z2nd/requ...
Without the blackouts, reddit will be back to normal in 6 months. And that's what terrifies a large portion of the blackout userbase - they know they don't actually have broad enough public support to make it work without forcing other people into it.
It's not the first or the last time a public forum has had a large group of users upset enough to step into disruptive behavior to try and get their way. We could easily see people start launching DDOS attacks or similar as well, it's happened before. Redditors think they're special but from a high-level perspective you're no different from some jilted wikipedian deleting articles or a 4chan user flooding a thread with gore, or DDOS'ing a forum. You're a nuisance, not a freedom fighter, and you're on private property.
The real fun one is going to be if some users escalate things enough that CFAA gets involved. Disruption of service, enjoy your lawsuit/jail time. And causing all requests to go 500 or not return the proper data is still disruption even if the service is still notionally up and responding to pings. Remember, this is a law that makes it illegal to log into a service if the operator wouldn't have wanted you there - using mod tools to disrupt service is still disrupting service!
Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private
#924Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t get the AI angle. The data already exists in dumps. How does restricting access to the API stop that? Sure, you don’t get access to new data but I doubt anybody cares about that given that there’s 15 years of existing data already. Especially if they kill all the interesting subs and turn Reddit into cat picture central.
True, but old data is not what companies want since it is readily available and probably already in models. Reddit produces more data than any other social media website in the text and picture format. I think Tiktok is relatively close but with videos.
Reddit is still also open to indexing, so the data is still currently available with no authentication required to anyone interested in crawling it. The training data for AI theory doesn't hold water.
Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private
#925Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private
#926Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was the same with Digg and Slashdot.
Unless there's an realistic alternative to Reddit that users are actually moving to - then no it's not.
Given the number of blacked out subs that link to a Discord, it seems like an alternative is already there. For sure it's not exactly the same, but it seems to serve a similar purpose for a lot of users.
Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private
#927Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spez is CEO because the board and investors deem him to be the best person for the job. Of course, he founded Reddit, so he has a strong case on merit for why he is the #1 person on the planet to run the company. The process for selecting moderators is way less meritocratic or democratic than this. They merely got there first, finders keepers. The analogy for landed gentry is accurate.
The board and the investors are not the community though. The community is reddit users , which didn't get to democratically pick him at all. He's there because rich folks, e.g. actual landed gentry decided he should be, not because the users chose him to lead. This is democratic in the same way the prince electors system of the HRE was, ie not at all.
> The community is reddit users, which didn't get to democratically pick him at all.
This cuts both ways though, mods are not the reddit users either, and users do not get to democratically pick mods either. The guy who squatted the domain name in 2005 is the permanent authority for that keyword, unless there is a specific ToS violation to unseat them.
If you don't want to post, or you don't want to mod, that's fine, log off. There are procedures for abandoned communities/moderation that will be followed and everyone moves on. But you can't shut everything down for everyone else either, and you certainly shouldn't be surprised when the board operator then removes your mod privileges and bans you for disruption of service.
There is no "the community voted to ignore the ToS and allow disruption of service". That's not a thing. Yes, the service is still disrupted even if the server is returning 500, or an empty page, or your protest page. Just like when Greenpeace hacks someone's site, that's still disruptive and illegal.
Be happy you're not being prosecuted under CFAA for denial of service. If logging into the system when the operator wouldn't want you there is so clearly illegal that it regularly results in jailtime for bona-fide security researchers, what do you think CFAA would say about knowingly utilizing mod tools to cause disruption of service and then continuing after being told to knock it off?
And yes, computer crimes are prosecuted quite globally.
Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private
#928Earlier quoted context omitted.
what are you talking about... i've used the official app since the beginning and honestly have no issues. I don't get this whole 3rd party app uproar.
Same, would love to know what is 'bad' about the official app.
- Pressing notifications brings up the wrong pages.
- Back navigation is very messed up and unreliable.
- Images, videos and posts often take a long time to load, and often just don't.
- No ability to copy/paste text from posts.
- Collapsing threads is unreliable.
- Barrages of spam notifications that are difficult to turn off.
just offhand.
Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private
#929Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why do you deserve to have no ads? Because my attention belongs to me. Exclusively. It's not yours. It's not reddit's. It's not Google's. It doesn't belong to anyone other than I, certainly not a corporation. It's not a currency that can be used to pay for services. They do not have the right to sell it off to the highest bidder. I deserve not to be advertised to for the same reasons women deserve not to be raped:…
You are choosing to use an ad based service. No one is forcing you to view reddit. Your attention belongs to you and you can choose to direct it where you want. You knew reddit included ads, you consented to use reddit which includes ads. Just because you don’t like ads doesn’t make it “mind rape”. If you don’t like penises, but consent to have sex with a cis man, it isn’t rape because he has a penis that you don’t l…
> You are choosing to use an ad based service. No one is forcing you to view reddit. Your attention belongs to you and you can choose to direct it where you want.
True.
> You knew reddit included ads, you consented to use reddit which includes ads.
It's not really an all or nothing, take it or leave it proposition. Just because they sent me ads, doesn't obligate me to view them. I get to view just the parts that I want to view.
We're not some captive passive consumer audience that reddit can jerk around at will. We are in control. We own the machine and we decide what it's going to display. If we decide we don't want to see ads, we're not gonna see ads and that's pretty much the end of it. What reddit wants or needs has pretty much zero bearing on the matter.
If you send me a page with some annoying element and I decide I want to get rid of it, it's within my power. All I have to do is inspect the element and delete it. Alternatively, I can download an annoyance filter extension with a huge database of those annoying elements to do it for me. It's called uBlock Origin.
This is called adversarial interoperability and it's an essential freedom.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
If I'm handed a magazine and it has annoying ads on it, I can rip out the pages and throw them in the trash. Same thing.
> Just because you don’t like ads doesn’t make it “mind rape”.
I think it does. I don't consent to having information I didn't ask for forcibly inserted into my mind for someone else's profit. When I opened this post, I wanted to see the comments, not irrelevant brands of products I don't care about. If I wanted to see products I'd have visited Amazon or gone to the market.
It's really simple. If you add noise to your signal, I'll filter it. I don't care if you make money by adding that noise. Find some other way to make money or go bankrupt.
> It isn’t the world’s responsibility
I'm having difficulty understanding what you're saying. I think you mean "it's not reddit's responsibility to cater to your needs". Well it doesn't have to. I'll look after my own needs -- by blocking its ads unconditionally and with no exceptions.
Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private
#930Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look, I'm not the biggest Mark Zuckerberg fan or anything, but I don't think the thus-far questionable business decision to pivot to the metaverse is quite the same level as having an very public mental breakdown and making anti-semitic remarks
I apologize, I should have been clearer. I don't mean Kanye's public antics and statements. I meant his questionable design/musical/performance choices. Mark has lost over $30B on Metaverse supported by a stagnating ad business. Apple just launched an AR product that seems quite a bit better than the Meta options. John Carmack publicly complained about the reasons he left work at Meta which demonstrate a lack of visi…
There’s a lot to pick apart here. How much money do you think Apple spent on their VR product vs Meta? Sure Apple’s is better, but it also costs SEVEN times more. Do you really think Apple’s will sell more units any time soon? Meta has already sold tens of millions of quests.
Also Carmack is a great programmer, but there’s no reason to think he knows a thing about the market and business strategy.
Sure there’s the whole metaverse thing, but even without that, people are getting value out of the Quest right now, playing Beat Saber etc.