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Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

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Re: Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

#371

Post by paulmd »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #114
erellsworth wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you underestimate the value of that free labor. Reddit isn't even profitable. Hiring mods for thousands of subreddits would cost them a ton of money, not only in wages but in the cost of finding and training those workers. Beyond that, the minute the mods are official employees of Reddit, Reddit is fully responsible for all the content on all those subs. Social media companies are already under a lot of scrut…

Paying .kids for the large subreddits won't cost that much. However doing that makes the company directly liable for all things. Right now they can at least try the legal argument "we just provide infrastructure and oh we didn't know what was uploaded there" as soon as they moderate themselves that blind eye strategy can't work at all. (Right now they can at least try it)

No it doesn’t. Do you think Facebook mods are unpaid?

User content is the safety line, not whether the platform pays moderators.

Re: Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

#372

Post by SirSourdough »

thewataccount wrote: post #173
wvenable wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> r/aww is literally just cute animals. There is a social contract and moderator effort to make that happen. When that contract is broken and moderators are stretched thin, how long is that subreddit still going to be just cute animals?

I appreciate the current mod's efforts. And I completely agree with you on 95%+ of subs. But I think there's enough active, and willing mods who already manage several large subreddits (10m+) capable of managing the half a dozen or so subs that I mentioned. And I'm only talking about 6 subs, not even 10's of subs. I just don't think theres enough ambiguity/complexity with moderating those in regards to choosing what…

If one of Reddits big goals in all this is to sell actually useful information on a broad variety of topics for training LLMs (I think they’ve basically said as much), then I’m not sure that only being able to prop up a few meme and cute animal subreddits is that much of a win.

It’s the long tail of niche subreddits where almost all the content that keeps Reddit at the top of SEO rankings and makes them interesting for training AI lives.

Re: Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

#374

Post by hayst4ck »

thereticent wrote: post #369
hayst4ck wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that was a part of the collective consciousness 10 years ago. People said "but how are you going to monetize" and everyone said "we'll figure that out later." So even if it was true back then (and it was), spez was probably 20-25 when he sold his soul? You don't exactly have the benefit of worldly wisdom when you are that young.

You might be speaking specifically about Reddit and the Q4 profit question, but otherwise I want to point out that the idea that immediate returns in business ultimately destroys good products has been in the cultural consciousness for much longer than 10 years.

This was not something I thought about, understood, or really had conveyed to me until I was in my late 20s and saw it happening first hand with product after product. When I asked "why" the answer was there, but I didn't get the answer until I asked the question. I didn't ask the question until I saw the harm.

So while what you say might be true, there is still the question of what culture your from, how these ideas enter that culture, and when those ideas are introduced to the people in that culture.

There is the subjective experience of "collective consciousness" to deal with and subjectively, I think that "growth is great" was louder than "short termism is bad".

We were drunk on VC funded growth, and now we are dealing with the hangover and asking how we got ourselves into the position. Getting drunk was great. The hangover is not.

Re: Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

#375

Post by chaosjevil »

xyst wrote: post #50

Good. This works out for everybody except the brain dead C-level executives that tried to bully indie app developers. - regular people get a break from their echo chambers - VOLUNTEER mods get a break - journalists get their news article The only loser here is the corporation side. Significant loss of value from decreased user activity. Subsequent loss of revenue. Inability to extract as much value from the users dat…

Blood sacrifices won't be enough, unless the sacrifice is the company as a whole. Oddly enough, the only time that Reddit managed to unite its userbase for a cause, that cause was against Reddit itself. Users might disagree on the best approach, but practically nobody trusts the company any more, it isn't just the CEO.

That's specially bad for the company in the light of the IPO.

>Although I do foresee Reddit “super mods” forcibly removing the blackout through their backend, removing mod status from the “rebels” and inserting their own friendly mods until they can find replacements.

They could, but this would cause damage on its own. People might hate the current mods but they'd hate the sycophants even more.

Re: Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

#376

Post by tmn »

SirSourdough wrote: post #370
pxmpxm wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I missing something - all reddit has to do is one code change to prevent subreddits from getting private or closed. Feels like a bunch of people are completely misreading their self-presumed social status and leverage. The content is what drives traffic and revenue, not their fungible volunteer labor.

Reddit forcing open the subreddits would result in massive backlash from moderators, who are often the main people providing content and enforcing content quality. It would crank the degree to which Reddit is tarnishing its reputation to 11. A very small portion of users are responsible for the majority of the content and community building on Reddit. I think you might be underestimating how reliant the 99% of users…

Maybe. I'm not sure though. Reddit has an organic way to grow it's user engagement. It didn't start out with all of these mods. The general mood/experience on reddit today is much chiller. A lot of the people susceptible to feelings of indignation are gone. I think it's very possible new mods / content contributors will grow organically, conforming to whatever in house tools reddit creates. But who knows, maybe it will go the way of digg.

Re: Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

#378

Post by paulmd »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #316
wvenable wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> r/aww is literally just cute animals. There is a social contract and moderator effort to make that happen. When that contract is broken and moderators are stretched thin, how long is that subreddit still going to be just cute animals?

I'm betting all subreddits soon turn into /r/eyeblech (gore/death/dismemberment gifs). Not necessarily illegal, but definitely not what you're looking for when you go to /r/awww

redditors really think they invented shitflooding lol

“Fact: there is NO DEFENSE against the digital ghillie suit!”

Re: Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

#379

Post by CommitSyn »

yamazakiwi wrote: post #141
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just logged out of my account everywhere, and turned off "remember me". It's shocking how I'm catching myself just reflexively, almost subconsciously alt-tabbing to Firefox and typing "reddit.com". Thanks, /u/spez, for helping me break the habit!

Breaking the muscle memory has been the hardest part for me. I don't have that much investment in Reddit succeeding and I'll be damned if I don't try to tap the app on my phone 3 or 4 times a day still, even after deleting.

I deleted my account and my 3rd party app and I found myself reflexively tapping the now-empty spot on my home screen 5-10 times yesterday. Today I haven't and only went to the mobile site a couple times to see what's going on with the state of things, but left as soon as the first "Oops, this /r/AskReddit text-only post is NSFW, open in the app!" message came up.

I have however visited HN and kbin 5-10x more today.

Re: Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

#380

Post by bentcorner »

linuxftw wrote: post #118
whatyesaid wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that means bots can take anything down unless you become really good at detecting bots. Not like it's hard for bots to get points you can do so with reposting and GPT for comments.

I'm sure they have metrics at this point on how often real humans take a particular action. If an account is reporting posts higher than some amount X, then shadow ban that account.

I think you underestimate the ability of AI to literally solve this problem for almost nothing. The large subs can absolutely be botted, if they're not already. Enough flags on an account? Just take it down, there will be 15 million new accounts in an hour.
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