Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

macrumors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 614 posts

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#231

Post by satvikpendem »

Panzer04 wrote: post #172
satvikpendem wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as in real life, voting may not be representative of the whole story. Selection bias can occur where people who care very much about a topic would vote for it while most casual users won't even care enough to vote. The polls I've seen on Reddit are a vast minority of overall votes compared to the subreddit size in subscribers, keeping in mind that many lurkers also don't even directly subscribe to a sub but may…

Fair points. That being said, I'd value the participants more so than the run-of-the-mill lurker. One creates the content for the lurkers to consume. Reddit makes money on the lurkers, but the NEED the commenters and mods to maintain the website as a whole. A straight count of users does not at all reflect who contributes the most value to the website.

There are a lot of people willing to be moderators, out of their 1 billion monthly active users. The current mods were also once regular users.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#232

Post by bardan »

yk wrote: post #18

Thing is, I am much more loyal to the mods of my favorite subs, then I'm to reddit. And my guess is, that is the case with a lot of the power users.

I appreciate the work good mods put in but I'm only loyal to the concepts of my favourite subs, or to the people who post on them. I don't know of anything online like /r/signalidentification, for instance, and I'll continue to go there in the future even if the blackout has given me a chance to move back from Reddit as a whole.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#233

Post by lazystar »

ulrashida wrote: post #159
lazystar wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Wager more care about corporations pushing around a volunteer workforce, though. I'm genuinely surprised by the fatalistic / why bother attitudes expressed here on HN, as if those attitude aren't the dominant factor enabling those outcomes.

A lot of folks here will commiserate with reddit's position - Microsoft and Google and ChatGPT are making billions from programs that were built using data gleamed from reddit's API's, and they didnt have to provide reddit with a single penny in return. Reddit has to do something to prevent the gold rush of data mining that is bound to occur from other companies building their own copycat LLM's.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#234

Post by mvdtnz »

Avamander wrote: post #186
mvdtnz wrote: post #104

Reddit would be right to remove these moderators. This protest does nothing for the users of Reddit. Why would they maintain a website of derelict communities when there's a clear and obvious alternative?

Huh? The protest is to make it possible to keep things working. It's bizarre to see the amount of complaining about mods making or breaking a sub and then at the same time the amount of people calling their actions impactless or leading to derelict communities. Which is it? Do users and Reddit need them or do they not? The only option after fucking over volunteers is that Reddit can start paying people to moderate an…

> The only option after fucking over volunteers is that Reddit can start paying people to moderate and keep their platform working.

Sounds good.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#235

Post by RheingoldRiver »

harryf wrote: post #139
moskie wrote: post #76

We (the internet community) made such a terrible mistake with social media. We formed connections and communities and friendships on sites like Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system. How awful it is to reduce human connection to that. To think that I am only allowed to maintain certain soc…

What gives me hope is if you ever take a break from social media you realize how worthless it all is. It really doesn’t hurt to disengage. For similar reasons it’s possible for new networks to show up which disrupt the old, such as TikTok. The point is as individuals we are way less dependent on social media than we imagine.

I disagree. If you find the right communities, you really make close friendships with people - even if you don't know their real names, how old they are, where they work, or where they live. None of that matters, because you share and connect over a common interest. And you could never find so many people IRL with similar interests as you.

If this isn't how you're using reddit, discord, etc, and it's easy to disconnect from them, then yeah just leave them. But they foster meaningful interactions too.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#236

Post by NoboruWataya »

moskie wrote: post #76

We (the internet community) made such a terrible mistake with social media. We formed connections and communities and friendships on sites like Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system. How awful it is to reduce human connection to that. To think that I am only allowed to maintain certain soc…

This is why I think federated alternatives like Lemmy are important and I would like to see communities migrate there instead of some other corporate walled garden. Otherwise we'll just be having the exact same discussion about some other website in five years. It pains me to see even a lot of FOSS-focused communities move their discussions to Discord, for example.

Most of the criticisms of the federated platforms centre around how they are difficult to use for the average user and could never achieve the scale that Reddit has. The difficulty point is a valid one and work should probably be done on that. But at a certain point I just don't really care, particularly about the scale point. The communities that are valuable to me aren't the huge ones full of "average users", they are (mostly) smaller communities full of people interested in tech and FOSS in particular. I can figure out federation and so can most of the people I probably want to hear from.

I don't mean any of this to sound elitist, I just feel like people who browse /r/pics and people who browse /r/selfhosted (for example) are probably different user bases with different preferences. If Reddit were to keep the former while the latter were to move to some other, slightly less seamless but more sustainable platform, maybe everyone wins.

There are, of course, a few non-technical subreddits I like that would fall through the gaps here, in that their average user might not appreciate a federated alternative. In days of yore those communities would have inhabited forums; I wouldn't mind seeing a resurgence of those.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#237

Post by Ledienejid »

Without taking sides, the main insight of this whole debacle is how incompetent Huffman and his team are. Dude failed an AMA on his own platform, how he could not know what that AMA was going to look like? He was absolutely not prepared. Absolute dolt.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#238

Post by deepsun »

moskie wrote: post #76

We (the internet community) made such a terrible mistake with social media. We formed connections and communities and friendships on sites like Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system. How awful it is to reduce human connection to that. To think that I am only allowed to maintain certain soc…

Yet every time I point to the root of the problem -- that most social media web properties are privately owned by their respective shareholders, who just benevolently let you store your* texts and photos at their premises for free -- I get downvoted heavily here on HN. The community doesn't want to hear that here.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#239

Post by cm2012 »

ulrashida wrote: post #159
lazystar wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Wager more care about corporations pushing around a volunteer workforce, though. I'm genuinely surprised by the fatalistic / why bother attitudes expressed here on HN, as if those attitude aren't the dominant factor enabling those outcomes.

Reddit has already said moderator APIs and disability related APIs will remain free. They are keeping their subreddits closed because they don't want to be inconvenienced. Mods don't have the moral high ground.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#240

Post by 1270018080 »

moskie wrote: post #124
hn_version_0023 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s almost enough to make one reconsider the use of social media entirely. My hope is that one day the kids will just stop using it and it dies it’s natural death.

I've wondered for a long time if social media is just a fad.

As long has humans are genetically predisposed to be addicted to it, I doubt it. Maybe in 200k years.
Post reply on HN