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The note Reddit sent to moderators threatening them if they don’t reopen

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Re: The note Reddit sent to moderators threatening them if they don’t reopen

#231
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you told people today that Reddit AMA's hadn't been working for the past 8 years because the company fired an employee then, they'd probably laugh. That's technically true, but that's because nobody today really thinks about Reddit AMAs, because there are fairly few of them and they're mostly lousy. When they employed Victoria, AMAs were frequent and involved high-profile public figures engaging with the users i…

> With the result that Reddit lost a popular, interesting feature and a lot of cultural relevance. Looking through /r/IAMA, and I can't say that I'm seeing that. If you look through the top voted AMA's of all time there, the vast majority are some years after Victoria's departure. Comparing those to the few on there from prior to her departure doesn't seem to show much of a difference, at least from what I can tell.…

I don't know if this is a good metric because Reddit five years ago had 4x as many active users than 9 years ago.

It would probably be an interesting exercise to download the data for all the AMAs and adjust by MAU to see what the actual most popular threads were, but I'm not going to do that right now.

Re: The note Reddit sent to moderators threatening them if they don’t reopen

#232
post #16

They’re gonna be left with bottom of the barrel mods. It’s a thankless task to begin with - a marginal proposition at best. Add some threats as a thank you for the unpaid work and it becomes downright abusive Who the hell is going to want to mod in that context?

The /r/science mods are all coming back on Monday, a decision they made a few days ago, before any threats were made. They are worried that if they got replaced, it would be with people who would destroy the community they worked so hard to build. I suspect a lot of communities, especially the smaller ones, feel the same way.

That's actually bottom of the barrel reasoning in my book, to cave to the admins because Reddit admins would punish you.

It's psychologically unhealthy, any therapist would tell you that.

Re: The note Reddit sent to moderators threatening them if they don’t reopen

#233

I really hope a decent Reddit replacement shows up soon; my impression is that HN is mostly webdevs, so surely some of y'all are on it?

I was confused at first by the federated nature of Lemmy, but making an account was easy and I'm thoroughly enjoying it now. The important thing to note – even though you join a particular Lemmy "instance", it doesn't particularly matter which one, because you can subscribe to communities (subreddits) from any instance. The instance I joined – vlemmy.net An aggregator of communities to join – https://lemmyverse.net/c…

[deleted]

Re: The note Reddit sent to moderators threatening them if they don’t reopen

#234

I 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…

There are distinct questions here: whether Reddit has the right to forcibly reopen subreddits, whether it’s justified in doing so, and whether it’s a good idea at all. The first isn’t in dispute, but the other two are open for debate. It could all go super well and everyone forgets about this shakeup, or it could engender further animosity and chase people (particularly trend-setting power users) to some other platfo…

Yeah. I get the whole fear of the same thing happening to Reddit that happened to Digg. But digg had Reddit nipping at its heels and it was still small, Reddit is huge there’s nowhere to chase them to.

The other alternative is for Reddit to just stand by and let the blackouts chase people away indefinitely. It is hard to imagine that is better. It will upset the people who have already decided to leave Reddit anyway, but for most of the people who just want to see funny GIFs, it will be better.

Re: The note Reddit sent to moderators threatening them if they don’t reopen

#235
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you have any evidence backing the statement that moderation quality correlates with sub closure?

> do you have any evidence backing the statement that moderation quality correlates with sub closure? I made no such statement.

> They’re gonna be left with bottom of the barrel mods.

sorry for pharaprasing.

do you have any evidence that there is a negative correlation between 'bottom of the barrel mods' and 'mods that are going to be outsted by the message about subs having be made private?'

Re: The note Reddit sent to moderators threatening them if they don’t reopen

#236

I 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…

> would be interesting. In what way would it be interesting?

You might get a lot better mods and more participation with profit motive. It certainly had that effect with YouTube.

There would, of course, be some downsides too.

Re: The note Reddit sent to moderators threatening them if they don’t reopen

#237
post #19

I really hope a decent Reddit replacement shows up soon; my impression is that HN is mostly webdevs, so surely some of y'all are on it?

Lots of the alternatives seem to be missing the core idea of what Reddit really is (a community of communities). I think first and foremost it's the community aspect of Reddit that makes it appealing. I've been building a platform called Sociables which is intentionally not just a Reddit clone. We are trying to create an all-in-one place for people to create communities and not just posts. Here's an example of a comm…

To be fair Reddit also is missing the core idea of what it itself is

Just think, one of Reddit's features for years was the "trending subreddits" list. Someone made that, someone else approved it. It got put on the front page, it became a core part of the experience. There were meetings!! Meetings where this was discussed. It was an OKR, maybe even of multiple people, was there a whole team?

But you and I understand that the essence of community is that you get a small group of people who interact and re-interact and who get used to seeing each other and who have fun doing this thing, whether it's shitposting memes or discussing God or something else. You grow past a certain size and now you are shouting into the void, which is the same experience you have every day, just go to your local pub and shout your hilarious comments at the TV and you'll have more listeners than your comments on a large subreddit.

"Trending subreddits," people literally came into daily stand-up, "Hi Jessica, how is the 'suddenly destroy Reddit communities just when they start growing and thereby make Reddit suck more' feature going?" "Well I ran into some roadblocks as the sudden influx of new users makes the statistics very hard to pull, I'm thinking of changing to a cron job that reassembles the list every hour." "Jessica, we've talked about this, making Reddit suck more is of top priority to my manager and my director, I don't care how you do it, just GET IT DONE and we can get a big bonus at the end of quarter" "I won't let you down, boss! Reddit WILL suck more by the end of this quarter."

I don't think it's still a thing anymore as-is but I don't think it was deleted for the fact that it was the make Reddit suck feature? I think they're still basically doing the same thing but just basically temp-autojoining users into those subreddits, "Reddit wasn't sucking fast enough when people had to opt-in to flashmobbing a promising community, now we're just going to shove the people in the door and scream 'you're a flashmob get to sucking!' and hope that works." More meetings were had on this!

Re: The note Reddit sent to moderators threatening them if they don’t reopen

#238

I 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…

Landlordism is a parasitical economic strategy.

And yet mods sign up for it!

Re: The note Reddit sent to moderators threatening them if they don’t reopen

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mods don't work for Reddit. They volunteer for Reddit moderation. Much like you can volunteer to be the leader of the DND club at a local hobby shop. They are not an employee. People who don't like what Reddit is doing should stop showing up. Mods who don't like it should stop moderating. It's as simple as that, if enough people agree, Reddit will be no more. I will bet Reddit will be just fine.

Of course there are within their rights from a legal pov. Doesn't change the fact that it's a terrible, outright hostile move.

It was hostile by mods to close a sub like r/nba the day after the finals, and hostile to close an important sub like r/science. A poll with a small fraction of the users that was only up for a few hours and potentially brigaded doesn't mean the majority of actual users wanted those subs to close.

Re: The note Reddit sent to moderators threatening them if they don’t reopen

#240
post #66
post #16

They’re gonna be left with bottom of the barrel mods. It’s a thankless task to begin with - a marginal proposition at best. Add some threats as a thank you for the unpaid work and it becomes downright abusive Who the hell is going to want to mod in that context?

If mods on Reddit really believed they were irreplaceable, wouldn’t it make more sense to protest by quitting?

>If mods on Reddit really believed they were irreplaceable

I was going more for "very hard, especially in bulk and on short notice" than irreplaceable there.

>wouldn’t it make more sense to protest by quitting?

Already did a while back...used to mod some big-ish subs.

Going private seems like a reasonable intermediate step though. A bit like workers holding a strike instead of straight to mass resignation

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