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

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211–220 of 447 posts

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

#212

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 nothing new here. Socialism vs Capitalism. The revolutionaries will lose, and they should. If they want to fight Reddit, they should start their own enterprise and compete in the market. I’m in full support of owners getting rid of problem employees or even volunteers. Reddit is a private enterprise and their owners have the right to do what they please.

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

#213
post #130

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.

Mods seem to think they own the subs they moderate. They do not; the subs belong to the community. Mods do have too much power at the moment. The easiest way to resolve this is to perma ban all the mods of closed subs, then remove the ability for subs to be closed.

Yet every sub poll I've seen after the blackout has been >50% support to continue it. The community wants the blackout.

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

#214
post #105

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.

Except:

1) Reddit says mod tools will remain free on the API (as well as disability tools)

2) Other moderators in this hacker news thread say the 3rd party stuff isn't necessary anyway.

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

#215
post #141

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…

there’s always more people who want to mod. mods don’t own the content. i would expect reddit to have a rule saying if a reddit has over 1,000 posts it can’t go private. there’s already a ton of mod power and they can make money by keeping clearly paid content active

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

#216
post #27

Good riddance. The moderators are the worst part of Reddit. Just pay someone to do their job.

A lot of well run subs would never exist in the first place without good mods. A very good example of that is /r/askhistorians, without a heavy enforcement of their guidelines the quality of that sub would be absolute trash. There are definitely a lot of bad mods, even more in popular subs, and even more in popular subs that are not centered around a community of hobbyist and/or fans. The value of reddit is not this…

This is the thing I don't think people understand. Just because you don't like the rules doesn't mean the mods are bad. Some communities have no-meme rules, this often elevates the conversation. And no "people will upvote and downvote what they want" doesn't work because you are now playing to the lower common denominator. If you don't like the rules, create your own sub with it's own rules. This has happened countless times in the history of Reddit. And before "But how will people know about the other sub? How will it get traction?" - That's a failing on Reddit's part, their discoverability is trash (as is their search).

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

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah before I deleted my accounts yesterday, the rate of weird pro-reddit admin comments was getting pretty high. It would not surprise me at all if they are trying to game the numbers more before their IPO, so they can claim they made the right decision. Investors: do you due diligence! Reddit has used fake accounts in the past! :)

Obviously, anyone who disagrees with me must be an astroturfer bot.

They (or someone at least) are definitely using bots: https://i.imgur.com/4e9jO7P.jpg

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

#218
post #141

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…

R/pics isn't exactly an example of a high quality subreddit.

Try the same thing on a subject domain specific sub, where the mods actively police the quality of comments. Askscience for example.

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

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your assumption relies entirely on the difference between new and old being a noticeable, significant bad. Nothing in this story implies noticeable, let alone significant. Old Reddit to New Reddit was noticeable and growth continued. The push from browser to app was a noticeable bad, an intended one, and Reddit still grew. You seriously underestimate the passivity of most users. Reddit has, by all regards, truly mess…

>Your assumption relies entirely on the difference between new and old being a noticeable, significant bad. Because we are in generation 1. What about X generations later? As for the UI change. That's a completely different topic and I am not sure why you are bringing this up. The UI change doesn't change the content/moderation of the communities. >It'll become a problem when mod quality is obviously, significantly w…

>What about X generations later?

X generations later the number of possible mutations are so big you'd be grasping to point at this as 'the' moment Reddit messed up, unless the statistics clearly indicate it (at which point you can still argue against it). For each person like you who said 'this API change was the moment things fell apart', you'll get another pointing out Reddit mobile, new Reddit, spez becoming CEO, the other incidents they scapegoated onto someone, and more.

Even now, people could argue the worst thing happening isn't the mods being replaced, but Reddit allowing mods to put popular subs on private. The way things are going, those two events will be so close together they'd be practically indistinguishable in the grand scheme.

>As for the UI change. That's a completely different topic and I am not sure why you are bringing this up.

No it's not. It boils down to the same thing: UX experience degradation. Redditors have been on the receiving end of UX degradation for more than a decade now. Your whole argument relies on new moderation making UX bad enough to drive users away.

>And I am predicting the mod (thus content) quality will eventually be significantly worse

Great, like almost everybody, nothing new. Only difference being, you set your forecast on 'in some day in the future' now, which wasn't at all clear from your OP, rather than 'this is the event that will kill Reddit in the next 3 months' everybody is proclaiming it as.

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

#220
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?

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?
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