Should 2023 be officially named the year of the Great Social Media Purge?
The note Reddit sent to moderators threatening them if they don’t reopen
221–230 of 480 posts
Re: The note Reddit sent to moderators threatening them if they don’t reopen
#222In my experience, whenever volunteer mod positions open, there is a near infinite supply of people that want those roles. For whatever reasons, people want it and those that have it typically seek to hold onto it. It's borderline inexplicable to me. How could someone want this in the first place and how could they be willing to do it in a volunteer capacity?
Maybe for some major subs, but I've had multiple small-to-medium sized subs die because a mod retired/deleted their account and no one stepped up quickly to replace them. Reddit kills unmodded subs really fast.
Sure, the major frontpage subs will be fine, but there's plenty of more niche communities that are already dying/getting banned for being unmodded because no one wants to mod them. I literally opened a link to a sub today that was banned for being unmodded 2 hours ago, presumably because the last remaining mod deleted their account.
So many of the discussions here seem to be people mostly thinking of reddit as the big frontpage subs, which also seems to be what Reddit Corporate seems to think. What we're all likely about to see is how much value there is in the longer tail of smaller subs that are being run as a passion project by a few people in a niche community. It's easy to point to the small subs that are some power-trip for one mod or set of mods, but there's also plenty of small little subs that are niche and interesting and simply would never have enough interest or activity to support more than 2-3 mods.
Re: The note Reddit sent to moderators threatening them if they don’t reopen
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was my thought as well. To answer your question, though, I imagine bad faith actors of various flavors will be flocking the site: 1. Corporate marketing departments 2. Unpopular political/religious factions seeking to surreptitiously "move the needle" 3. Those who wanted to become mods before but didn't make the cut for completely valid reasons. Now they have an opportunity, only the quality will decrease as a r…
Finally, I can fulfill my destiny of taking over r/television and banning anyone who says anything positive about a show with a laugh track. It should never have been allowed to begin with.
I need someone to make an AI-show filter for removing laugh tracks.
Re: The note Reddit sent to moderators threatening them if they don’t reopen
#224I don’t blame them. Reddit owns the subreddits, not redditors. I have no idea why someone would put the time required into moderating a large sub for no money just for Reddit’s benefit in the first place. A Reddit model where the mods share in profits (kind of how YouTube creators do) would be interesting. But if you’re going to sign up for that, you can’t expect Reddit to just let you tank their site. It was never y…
A subreddit is made up of users, not an entry on reddit. Reddit can do whatever they want with their site but they can't force users to do anything.
Thats why I argue that the boycott should be user driven and not mod driven. Let each user individually decide if they want to boycott rather than trying to force everyone into a boycott but shutting down entire subs.
Re: The note Reddit sent to moderators threatening them if they don’t reopen
#225Reddit should have been like the wiki.
Re: The note Reddit sent to moderators threatening them if they don’t reopen
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No, I'm not going to "revise my post" to step in line with what you're expecting. I'm just never going to bother joining this community now. Good! I only visit well curated subreddits. I don't want drive-by visitors, floods of memes, or similar content. My bread and butter are subreddits like r/DebateReligion and r/AskHistorians. If the mods are not to my liking, there usually is an alternate sub on the same subjec…
>So thank you for staying away. And this is exactly why Reddit has gone to hell. Mods with that attitude. "I was here first, so therefore I get to unilaterally set the Overton window for all discussion herein. If you don't like it, you're banned." HN seems to be the last place on the internet where competing thoughts can exist. It's amazing to me that if moderation is so hard, why dang can do such a good job single-h…
> And this is exactly why Reddit has gone to hell. Mods with that attitude. "I was here first, so therefore I get to unilaterally set the Overton window for all discussion herein. If you don't like it, you're banned."
You can always create your own and be the first over there.
I agree though that there are some problems with the model, such as a long gone head mod suddenly poking back in and doing something radical, as well as a discoverability issue.
> HN seems to be the last place on the internet where competing thoughts can exist.
HN is good precisely because it's well moderated and ontopic. There are rules here as well, and content is filtered quite thoroughly. If you don't notice it it's just either because you happen to agree with the status quo by accident, or you got used to it over time.
Re: The note Reddit sent to moderators threatening them if they don’t reopen
#227Key paragraphs > If there are mods here who are willing to work towards reopening this community, we are willing to work with you to process a Top Mod Removal request or reorder the mod team to achieve this goal if mods higher up the list are hindering reopening. We would handle this request and any retaliation attempts here in this modmail chain immediately. > Our goal is to work with the existing mod team to find a…
I guess the trick would be to flood Reddit with requests from allied mods that will keep the sub closed anyway. Presumably Reddit doesn't have the bandwidth to really vet these requests.
This is the way. Especially if the action can be more unpredictable than simply taking the subreddit private. Maybe remove all new posts or something.
If you can turn all of the subreddits into tens of thousands of problem children for Reddit that they can’t fix with automation, they will be unable to cope.
Re: The note Reddit sent to moderators threatening them if they don’t reopen
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
How so?
People want to participate in their communities and have access to historical posts and comments. Mods are not letting them do that.
In almost all of the subs I've seen doing this, there were days of polling and discussion ahead of time, with the users themselves demanding the blackout.
Re: The note Reddit sent to moderators threatening them if they don’t reopen
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was my thought as well. To answer your question, though, I imagine bad faith actors of various flavors will be flocking the site: 1. Corporate marketing departments 2. Unpopular political/religious factions seeking to surreptitiously "move the needle" 3. Those who wanted to become mods before but didn't make the cut for completely valid reasons. Now they have an opportunity, only the quality will decrease as a r…
Finally, I can fulfill my destiny of taking over r/television and banning anyone who says anything positive about a show with a laugh track. It should never have been allowed to begin with.
But what about Seinfeld??
Re: The note Reddit sent to moderators threatening them if they don’t reopen
#230If the Reddit admins don't want mods to have the ability to set a subreddit to private, then why did they even give them the option in the first place? Couldn't they just disable the "private" flag for all subs and be done with it?
I'm really surprised this isn't what they're doing. It has the same effect without causing a lot of strife and backstabbing that is surely just going to poison the well further.