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

551–560 of 614 posts

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#551

Post by rtpg »

gretch wrote: post #366
rtpg wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I get that for absent-minded browsing but even just...having a hobby and talking about it with people feels pretty much like Normal Person Behavior(TM) and Reddit's subreddits worked well for that in the same way that forums in the past did. Not the end of the world but as a kid who only could find other people to talk about certain hobbies with online up until college sounds like a lot of pepole will be more…

We’ve only had this communication capability for the last .01% of human existence. Even 150 years ago, if you wanted to communicate with anyone outside your town, you had to pay a horse based courier what was most likely a very expensive fee. Not to mention the millions of years before that. Did all these previous generations find less satisfaction in life? Well who knows but I argue not. We don’t have to structure o…

People say this but it's patently obvious that life was more miserable 150 years ago! ~everyone's life was basically toiling away every day to survive. There are obviously examples at the margin that change things up but let's be real. Life is a bit better!

I am personally for some financial incentive changes (though I think that we can somehow figure out how to build communities that don't cost as much to run), so it's not like reddit in its current form has to exist. I just think that we can acknowledge that online communities are a nice to have for many people.

And to expand on that, online communities can complement offline communities in very interesting ways (See how chess has grown thanks to things like chess.com, and all that feeding into an increase in people participating in social chess events. Or things like board games being complemented by things like BGA)

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#552

Post by rtpg »

jimbokun wrote: post #275
rtpg wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I get that for absent-minded browsing but even just...having a hobby and talking about it with people feels pretty much like Normal Person Behavior(TM) and Reddit's subreddits worked well for that in the same way that forums in the past did. Not the end of the world but as a kid who only could find other people to talk about certain hobbies with online up until college sounds like a lot of pepole will be more…

Or maybe they’ll spend more time doing their hobbies than typing about them.

Definitely a thing, yes

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#553

Post by satvikpendem »

ddtaylor wrote: post #549
satvikpendem wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't really like this carte blanche idea that everyone is going to do bad things It's not about doing good or bad things, it's about following the incentives ( cui bono? ). Corporations are amoral entities that seek to maximize profits, just as living organisms are entities that seek to maximize reproductive success. There's nothing wrong with either incentive, but it's crucial to recognize that those are the in…

> Corporations are amoral entities that seek to maximize profits The steps they take to obtain that goal matter a lot. If they went around literally stealing money from peoples wallets, we wouldn't just hand-wave it away and say "oh, they're amoral entities" > just as living organisms are entities that seek to maximize reproductive success We still consider it unethical to obtain that goal by any means necessary. > T…

Just as a lion eating a gazelle has no moral qualms, a corporation does not either, so long as it's legal. Expecting ethical behavior in a corporation when such behavior is not encoded in its fitness function is misguided. You may not like this answer but it's true. If you want corporations to act ethically, encode it in their fitness function; make there be legal or monetary consequences to acting unethically because until then, they will simply do what they want to do.

In other words, even if you may feel that corporations are acting unethically, without any consequences for their actions, they'll just continue to do so, that's just the reality of it. You can try to change it, as you mention in your last paragraph, but that will be exceedingly difficult.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#554

Post by realusername »

capableweb wrote: post #199

One thing I don't quite understand is how the CEO first claims that only 3% of the user base is using 3rd party apps, and then later claims that "And the opportunity cost of not having those users (3rd part app users) on our platform, on our advertising platform, is really significant" (from https://www.npr.org/2023/06/15/1182457366/reddit-ceo-steve-h... ) Is that 3% of the user base really having such a big impact s…

It's just pure corporate BS, Reddit never even tried to make ads available from the API in the first place. If that was such a problem, they would at least have tried something.

Then ads are half abandoned even on their official platform itself, they polished the avatar NFTs instead... Reddit has probably the most outdated ad market of all the social networks and they cannot blame third party apps for that.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#555

Post by Ekaros »

satvikpendem wrote: post #71

> If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team. Moderators exist to moderate a community, not to shut it down wholesale. Reddit's respon…

The readers and posters do not need to close the sub. Just unsub and then stop reading/posting.

Extremely simple. If they are too addicted to not do that... Well maybe solve that issue first.

As they leave the sub and reddit will naturally die and get eventually replaced.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#556

Post by lawn »

andreareina wrote: post #340
silcoon wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/reddit

> We moderate less, not more, when YC or a YC-related startup is the story https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937269

It strikes me as incredibly naive to believe them.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#557

Post by Avamander »

George83728 wrote: post #315
Avamander wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many of them will be bad a the job, they can be weeded out over time just like usual. How long would users tolerate that though? > there's a huge crowd of scabs willing to take the job Probably. Though I see few incentives that won't turn perverse ones, especially now that Reddit clearly doesn't want to support mods. So this will last as long as there are communities that haven't been ran into the ground. Those who…

How long would reddit users tolerate bad moderation? Let me see... > Founded: June 23, 2005 At least 17 years.

Funny, but empirically false.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#558

Post by beezlewax »

jhanschoo wrote: post #396
harryf wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For reddit specifically, I have to disagree. It's a sad state the Internet has become, where you used to get coherent results from decentralized blogs when you google a sufficiently niche hobbyist topic. These days you just get content marketing spam. Append reddit to your search and you get subject-matter experts. The valuable conversation and folk knowledge is all siloed on social media.

SMEs or often peopling claiming to be SMEs. They'll outright lie often too - chatgpt eat your heart out

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#559

Post by midoridensha »

bbor wrote: post #515
midoridensha wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Care to take bets on how well this will turn out? I'm betting many communities are going to turn very shitty, but ultimately it won't hurt Reddit's bottom line one iota. In fact, Reddit will probably be more profitable than before. Just look at TikTok: you don't need communities with intelligent discussion to have a highly profitable company. Instead, it's better to chase vapid morons who want to watch shitty 1-minu…

It is my opinion that viewing oneself as a special light in a world of vapid morons leads to a sad, angry life. Just thought I'd weigh in, one vapid moron to another :)

The world isn't completely full of vapid morons. There's plenty of intelligent people here, plus there's plenty of intelligent people on various Reddit subs, who are interested in intelligent discourse. There's plenty of popular media that isn't vapid and moronic: just look at Star Trek: it's been a cultural phenomenon for over a half-century and it's rather intellectual for a series aimed at the general public, yet it's rather difficult to find anyone these days who's never heard of it.

There's nothing terribly special about people who are reasonably intelligent and are interested in intelligent discussions about various topics; we're not some vanishingly small minority. Civilization wouldn't have gotten this far if 99% of people were vapid morons. There are a lot of vapid morons out there, as evidenced by the rise of TikTok (and to be fair, not everything there is utter trash), but they're not the overwhelming majority of the population IMO.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#560

Post by npteljes »

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.

As a social network, it might be worthless, but it's very useful for me as a searchable information trove. During the blackout I have been bitten by this many times, just searching for something and then getting a private reddit page. I think reddit's system works much better than the god-awful traditional forums, where the informational comments and the one-off replies have the same weight.
Post reply on HN