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Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

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Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#561

Post by cornholio »

b112 wrote: post #418
pmoriarty wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The solution for this was incredibly simple. Reddit you want to charge for the API? Go right ahead, we all want you to make money. But when the volunteer labor you need in order to function started complaining because this is going to kill the modding tools they need - you should have immediately, like next day, apologized for the oversight and promised free API credits to them until you sort this out." From the AMA…

This entire thing started, as far as I recall, because the above was NOT being done. You're reading misinformation / misdirection.

And once it had gained momentum, it exploded into a power struggle with the owners of the site. It's now a pure tribal war: the mod tribe will not accept any compromise short of full rollback of the proposed changes, and Reddit cannot do that because - just like all major platforms - it cannot support adblocking alternate clients that are profitable while free riding on their infrastructure.

It's also very predictable who will win the war: whomever has the root keys of the servers and web domains. Major reddits like r/funny are providing very limited value in the grand scheme of things, the vast majority of the content is viral, not locally produced. So if a user is a r/funny subscriber and that goes dark, just present him with content from r/humor for a few months, they will get to see the same viral memes and 95% of the users will never notice anything went wrong.

Mods vastly overestimate their power here and underestimate the number of lurkers that form the backbone of Reddit viewership and are indifferent to this issue.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#562

Post by Klonoar »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #378
Klonoar wrote: post #62

One somewhat-related bit on the topic of moderators: does it bother anyone else that the stewards of some of these communities are effectively 100% anonymous? Are we actually okay with these spaces that shape significant discussion/sentiment being guided by people who lack accountability? I want to be clear that I'm not saying we should be doxxing mods or anything, but if there is a significant changeover of moderato…

> One somewhat-related bit on the topic of moderators: does it bother anyone else that the stewards of some of these communities are effectively 100% anonymous? Are we actually okay with these spaces that shape significant discussion/sentiment being guided by people who lack accountability? That doesn't follow; just because people aren't going by their real-world names doesn't mean that they're not accountable. For t…

Whether they work for an organization that's pushing a view, etc.

You (like many here) seem to think I want full documentation of who a Mod is, when I'm fairly certain my comment implies otherwise.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#563

Post by bluescrn »

pndy wrote: post #438
spazx wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New reddit is the worst. Who even designed it? Every time I accidentally find myself on new reddit UI, I feel like I'm looking through foggy glasses. Over the course of about 20 seconds, I blindly click around, feeling lost and confused, then frustrated, and then I just add "old" to the URL.

Probably it was created by someone who prefer mobile environments and who also believe that bulky big interfaces are good. New design seems to be aiming at keeping users engaged with the site all the time by obstructing visibility of comments, for example Yesterday I saw a thread on tildes where some new user presented changes to the site via custom style which introduces rounded corners and big elements all around:…

No point designing it for mobile browsers if they're going to block mobile browsers from using it, or at best irritate the hell out of mobile web users with relentless 'app nags'

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#564

Post by p_l »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #446
apgwoz wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News is written in arc. The first reddit was written in Common Lisp. clisp, specifically, I believe. Aaron convinced them to do it in his web.py and it was rewritten in a weekend (or so the story went). Later, it was written in Pylons and open sourced. No idea these days.

Ouch. Mixed character, that's for sure, but I guess no hero is perfect.

Well, their Common Lisp setup was hilariously broken, not by fault of the language IMO...

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#565

Post by sirl1on »

himinlomax wrote: post #425
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lemmy is still significantly lower user count but honestly I prefer the community at the moment. Everything feels small and jovial. At least for the 12 comments I've posted thus far. I'm running my own, which makes it easy to federate out to pretty much anything and worry less about overload as I'm not really pushing for users. Thus far, it's definitely felt like a very viable replacement for reddit for the communiti…

Their hardcoded scunthorphe filter blocks very common word in non English languages, such as the French words for late, delay, and firewood. The lead dev insists, rudely and vehemently, that those who have a problem with it are fascists.

This hasn't been the case for quite a time https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1773

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#566

Post by themoonisachees »

jimmydorry wrote: post #339
faeyanpiraat wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this downvoted? According to the linked article, even the bots which exceed the usage were manually whitelisted to stay free.

They are probably downvoted because the majority of developers of said moderator tools have pulled the pin and are shutting them down... seeing as the writing is already on the wall. Why spend any more effort maintaing the tools created when Reddit has said they will kill them off as soon as they have finished their own version? And anyone following what Reddit has been doing in the leadup to this stand-off, would be…

This is not even accounting for the fact that outside of business practices, they have completely alienated developers, by showing them they will take their words out of context, adversarially try to pit users against them and give them 30 days to comply or else. Why would anyone want to enter in a business agreement with a company that does this, before even looking at price?

Also: reddit pinky promises to implement mod tools they've been pinky promising for more than 5 years. Back when overwatch 1 came out, I became a mod for /r/overwatch_memes (now dead, the subreddit without an underscore ultimately was better) and even modding this subset of a subset of a gaming community would have been impossible without the API. Several moderation features that I ended up developing a bot for (using the API), reddit had been promising to implement for some time, and none of them are currently implemented. If you've been a mod all this time, you know that reddit promises to mods are completely empty. It's been fine until now because you could rely on other tools but modding anything with regular users without these tools is impossible without significantly restricting rules on allowed content.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#567

Post by zpeti »

safety1st wrote: post #212
spazx wrote: post #109

Smelled this one coming miles away. Next, they'll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they're dedicated to. Eg. r/starwars to Disney, r/startrek to Viacom/Paramount, etc. Then, old.reddit.com will stop working spontaneously, just like how they toyed with killing mobile browser access to force users to download the app, which they probably will eventually. That's going to be the final push…

They are done, 100%, this is the turning point and it's all downhill from here. They depend fundamentally on volunteer labor and every decision they've made since announcing the API change has alienated that labor. The morale of every mod I know is in the tank. The solution for this was incredibly simple. Reddit you want to charge for the API? Go right ahead, we all want you to make money. But when the volunteer labo…

Well, if I was Huffman, the question I would be asking is can I bring revenue up so much from api and other things that I can now employ a lot of mods?

He might have made that call already, and it might be possible.

Facebook works with paid mods after all.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#568

Post by themoonisachees »

brazzy wrote: post #546
safety1st wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are done, 100%, this is the turning point and it's all downhill from here. They depend fundamentally on volunteer labor and every decision they've made since announcing the API change has alienated that labor. The morale of every mod I know is in the tank. The solution for this was incredibly simple. Reddit you want to charge for the API? Go right ahead, we all want you to make money. But when the volunteer labo…

> Instead Reddit decided to escalate. Declare war on the people who make their service possible. It was the dumbest possible move they could make for their business. The decision makers behind this must operate in one hell of an echo chamber. There is absolutely no way they are not aware of this. No, they've made a conscious decision that completely alienating and driving away the parts of the communities which care…

The mistake is that reddit thinks moderators use the API for convenience and not by necessity. Previous protests against reddit didn't last long, because they were against things that fundamentally didn't matter outside of ethics, while this is, especially for moderators, a significant ask for their already unpaid labor. Moderators, emboldened by user support, are on strike because this affects them personally in a big way. The interpersonal bullshit spez in particular has been pulling was just the nail in the coffin for users who weren't quite sure who to support.

Re: Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private

#570

Post by themoonisachees »

braindead_in wrote: post #415
TeMPOraL wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are Reddit users waiting in the wings, wringing their hands ready to jump at the 'oppurtunity' to moderate established subreddits and will happily devote their time to custodial duties. (...) There are people who thrive on having power over others even though in this case, subreddit moderation, it is perceived power. Yes. Those are the very people who should be never ever allowed to become mods, or to be anyw…

> Those are the very people who should be never ever allowed to become mods, or to be anywhere near any position of power Okay. How about AI as the new mod then?

And how will this AI (that doesn't exist but sure) interact with reddit?
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