As some subreddits continue blackouts to protest Reddit’s plans to charge high prices for its API, Reddit has informed the moderators of those subreddits that it has plans to replace resistant moderation teams to keep spaces “open and accessible to users.”
Edit, there seems to be conflicting reporting on this issue:
While the company does “respect the community’s right to protest” and pledges that it won’t force communities to reopen, Reddit also suggests there’s no need for that.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762501/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-interview-protests-blackout
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Hey everyone we’re trying to keep the reddit threads centralized in technology in beehaw. I’m not locking this one because there’s a lot of discussion, but consider moving the chat over to https://beehaw.org/post/576904
Yes, I got the “message” from the Reddit CEO, and decided to pre-empt that, and I spent a few hours today manually deleting each and every post I made in my subreddit. The content is already anyway on my blog, on The Internet Archive, and on the Fediverse. So my subreddit now looks like this (he is welcome to let someone else take it now):
As of now, more than 80% of our top 5,000 communities (by DAU) are open
I’m a bit paranoid that this could be a technical truth because the communities still closed have dropped in DAU.
Edit: Checked the blackout tracker, of the ones listed 205 are still closed or restricted, so it’s probably an accurate claim, though it seems about half of the participating subreddits are still closed.
The least they could do is make it less obvious who they will replace the mods with. I expect this kind of blatant takeover attitude from a place with less legal department. Like twitter.
the idea that a cabal of mods were going to take things in a good direction was always unsound
Notoriously mature and level headed mods that spend all day on the internet putting an excessive amount of emotional energy into something most people barely care about… Who could have predicted this?
Hahaha you know before this many people didn’t think of reddit as corporate corporate. They scewed themselves and ruined their goodwill
I have to admit, it has changed the way I think of reddit, both as an entity and as a source of information.
I swear Reddit is not only not learning from history but purposely trying to repeat it again thinking oh the previous guys were just too weak…
I do think they know exactly how fucked the whole situation is, they are just trying to make the jump and peace out as long as they can make any money. This is an exit-strategy.
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Reddit is already dead. Old.reddit will be removed soon.
Spez claimed that there are no plans to shut old.reddit down. We’ll see.
Reddit is deaddit. Long live the glorious Lemmy-Kbin Continuum.
Good luck with that! I’m excited to see the fireworks as their brand-new mod teams use their brand-new mod tools right as they go public. Should be quite a show.
And on top of that when the new mods find out it’s just like a regular job but without pay tons will bail out.
btw: thank you mods, honestly, after doing it for a small time I think you are saints.
And I bet spammers will target the subreddits where mods have been removed.
I was a mod on a big sub for awhile many years ago and it was a literal horrowshow every day. It was an endless torrent that never stopped, the mod team basically ran 24/7. It was guaranteed you would see at least some fucked up bigotry every time you looked in the queue because the sub was a regular target for those people. It was really just a nonstop firehose of all the worst the internet has to offer, one reported Reddit comment at a time, forever. The tools I had access to were janky browser plugins and things like that, stuff previous mods had built themselves years before because the actual Reddit tools were inadequate. The sub involved so much moderation the team was very organized and you had to put in a certain amount of work every month, it really was like a part time job where you get to set your own hours but can be “fired” for slacking. You often feel emotionally drained afterwards just like a real job, and you start feeling anxious when you “clock in” because fuck not this same miserable bullshit yet again, just like a real job. I have so much respect for quality moderation, it is not at all easy in any way.
With all the time and effort mods like yourself put into looking after subs, does Reddit not have at the very least a way of publicly rewarding moderators that do some much work keeping subs running? I know fellow Redditors can hand out ‘rewards’ but something directly from Reddit would show the community how much mods are appreciated and required.
Not that I’m aware of, but this was many years ago now so things could be different. I personally wouldn’t have wanted any kind of public reward because that can paint a target, you get direct messages from problem users and other issues that come with recognition. I never publicly mentioned being a mod anywhere on Reddit, it was one of the things the mod team warned new mods about because trolls and other problem users will start targeting you directly.
That’s a very good and fair point.
@coldredlight @peyotecosmico interesting!
Do you have any thoughts on what kind of mod tooling the Threadiverse needs to make mods’ work easier?
@rysiek @coldredlight @peyotecosmico from my experience modding on Facebook, the things I most often wished for were just better views of incoming comments. Being able to sort and group by time on a certain post, for example, and then filter that list by keyword so I can take bulk actions.
Being able to restrict who can comment on a post helps a LOT. The amount of harassment I had to deal with dropped significantly when I could change a post to only accounts over a certain age, for example.
I don’t really have enough experience with them yet to have specific thoughts but my impression is they are very basic currently and need a lot of work. One thing that’s really important is being able to do bulk actions against multiple users quickly. I remember the times when big attacks would happen and we would have a sudden flood of obvious problem users posting comments blatantly intended to cause disruptions, being able to efficiently respond in the moment to that scenario can be really important. It sucks when the mod team lacks the ability to respond quickly because in the meantime users trying to have a real conversation end up getting harassed, angered, and driven away with the impression the mods are worthless. You don’t want to have to fight your tools and spend a bunch of time per individual action because by the time you get to dealing with the full swarm of trolls the conversation might have really taken a turn or be basically over so you end up cleaning things up after it doesn’t make much difference for the users. Also, bots like automod are extremely useful and important so I would say the fediverse needs them ASAP. I never messed with the bots when I was mod but they were definitely like a force multiplier for the mod team.
@coldredlight @rysiek It seems to me that search would be critical. An ideal workflow during a flood might look like:
- Search for a particular keyword (or regular expression 🤩)
- Multi-select relevant comments
- Optionally: Review list of the associated usernames, possibly annotated with account age etc. and allow deselecting any that were accidentally included
- One-click ban + remove recent comments of all users in list.
or the people who now see an opportunity to take over a sub and power-trip
there is no good outcome for reddit with this situation
I think what will happen is that a lot of the subs are eventually going to end up in the hands of the few mods who love sucking up to the admins and the mods who are in it for the dopamine they gain power-tripping instead of the mods who are in it to make the subreddit the best version of itself.
This will only further the “5 Mods Control 92 Of The Top 500 Subs” issue and lead to overall less happy, less engaged users.
undefined> This will only further the “5 Mods Control 92 Of The Top 500 Subs” issue and lead to overall less happy, less engaged users.
With that many subs, they couldn’t be good mods even if they wanted to. It is truly only a power trip and badge collecting at that point.
It’s like bragging that they’re the CEO of 3 companies…ok so you’re doing a terrible job managing 3 companies instead of trying to do good at 1.
And on top of that when those “tools” don’t materialize and they’re more overworked than previous mods having to manually squash bots and alt right trolls, even more will bail.
There are enough power hungry people ready to jump in the first opportunity they get to moderate
Sure, but let’s keep in mind eagerness does not equal competence.
@bird I had a feeling that was going to happen…
the fuckening just doesnt stop. u/Spez lost complete touch with the platform itself.
But hey, they own the joint. they can make their own decisions.
Yeah and we own this joint! I’m going to open my own instance, with blackjack and hookers
He has not lost touch, he doesn’t care. He’s bought and paid for. If shit does go south, he’s the fall guy.
And he will leave with a huge payout so he is set either way.
So much for moderators being “free to run their communities as they choose” as this article outlines
https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/204533859-What-s-a-moderator-
It’s pretty obvious they’re given free reign until they happen to disagree with admins and then it’s “they’re holding subreddits hostage”, “they’re just Stewarts” etc
Reddit admins will legitimately say and do anything to frame this as not their own fuck up
Lol stewards.
Stupid Stewarts. >:-(
Everyone needs to realise it doesnt matter. Enough people already came to lemmy for us to carry on without reddit. Now we just do the normal long haul work - help users who need help so people start searching lemmy for tech solutions, post our normal content here so there is a reason to stay, upvote and comment others work so there is engagement. The rest will follow as this grows and grows. We have already won. Lemmy is no longer a fringe interest.
I feel the same way. Critical mass has already been reached
I feel like another critical change happened, and that is that Reddit’s users views of themselves changed. The idea that we are giving Reddit free content and labor so they can profit from it is spreading around.
An ugly underlayer has been laid bare and many are finding they don’t really like it.
Hell yeah. Quality content is what Lemmy needs right now, the rest will follow
Agreed, I have moved on. Lemmy is at the place now that it feels more like what the Internet should be. It feels more personal and tight knit. By the end with reddit, I felt so much like a tiny fish in a gigantic pond that it felt completely pointless to comment on anything.
Yeah I agree that enough attention has been placed on Lemmy for it to pop in Redditors heads when they start thinking of other sites to go to. It won’t happen overnight but that’ll also give the Lemmy devs time to apply some fixes and add new features.
help users who need help so people start searching lemmy for tech solutions
For a moment, I misread this as “tech positions” and got excited about a job board on here.
Community idea: we develop a fake company that we all “work” at so that we can vouch for each other and use our “experience” on our resumes.
I’ll be your reference if you’ll be mine.
Lemmings re-discover ancient multibillion dollar corporate CEO secret strategies
Or just list it as volunteer work…
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Im nkt here to hunger strike from reddit until i get hungry. Im willing to hunger strike till i die. Fortunatly lemmy seems to be a source of nourishment but ive made my decision.
Lemmy is a “ground floor” for the next random tidbits of knowledge aggregator. And I don’t mean that as Lemmy is new, but rather it’d the next port-of-call and mature enough to be engaging while not being entrenched in decades’ old procedures.
I’m excited. I logged off Reddit when Christian shuttered Apollo, signed up on Beehaw and never looked back.
Glad I left Reddit tbh, so far Lemmy/the Fediverse seems to be way better.
I’m tempted to say it’s better, but, unfortunately, in many ways it’s not.
What Reddit had, most of the time, was semi-canonical communities. There was /r/python, /r/linux, /r/privacy, etc. The diaspora of Lemmy is a shadow of all of that. Surely, there are a dozen or so (at least) /c/python communities on Lemmy, but is there a single one that’s anywhere near as active as the Reddit one? No. Not so far, at least.
And unfortunately, I can say as an instance admin, the lemmy moderation tools are just flat bad. We had to turn off open registration and enable email verification, not because we would otherwise need it, but the Lemmy moderation tools are 100% reactive and only operate on a 1-by-1 basis. If a spambot signs up 100 fake accounts, I have to go and individually ban each and every one of them. There’s no shift+select, ban.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad to be here, and Lemmy’s great, and there’s far less toxicity (so far). All I’m saying is, (1) there’s work to do, (2) don’t gloat.
We’re not there yet, imho, but Reddit definitely feels like damaged goods, and the atmosphere has gotten toxic and polarized. So I think we’re going to see a slow decline, unless they somehow get their community management back in order, but the recent comments by the CEO seem to suggest he sees the community as cattle, basically.
Reddit was pretty unpolished when I joined 13? years ago. There is something awesome about being on a frontier where posts are getting 20 comments instead of 2,000. Everybody gets a chance to contribute and be heard.
I like the concept, and so far I like the implementation, but it’s still far too early to gain mass adoption based on what I’m seeing from bugs (account creation silently failed on multiple instances, and login can also silently fail) as well as how registering can feel like jumping through hoops. I wanted to register for beehaw but don’t much care to go through an interview process. Then I wanted to make sure I could access beehaw content, but saw they recently defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, so I had to make sure not to register on either of those.
I don’t know this will catch on. Currently each instance is so small, and the communities are even smaller. I worry that content won’t update often enough to warrant checking more than once or twice a day. We’ll have to wait and see how much this all grows and matures. I’d like this to be my Reddit replacement, but we’ll see.
