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99.99% of reddit users have no idea who spez is and probably wouldn't care if they learned about his shenanigans 99% of reddit users are aware that moderators

• mynameisvlad 3y ago
  Considering the amount of media attention this has gotten from even mainstream sources including places like the BBC, I’m going to go out on a limb and say the number is far higher than 99.99%. That doesn’t even count all the people that are visiting their favorite subreddits only to see them closed with a message detailing what’s happened.
  • George83728 3y ago
    > Considering the amount of media attention this has gotten from even mainstream sources including places like the BBC Reddit moderators are uniquely privileged when it comes to making their opinions heard on reddit. The shuttering of subreddits is sensational and splashy enough to get media attention, but in itself says little about how most reddit users feel. A moderator revolt is like a strike of middle managers, revolting against upper management. They can lock the doors and keep all the common workers out, but that isn't evidence that the common workers have much investment in the strike. I think this whole thing probably follows the 90-9-1 rule; the 9 are mods and powerusers flipping out against the 1, while the 90 are probably oblivious or simply indifferent.
    • mynameisvlad 3y ago
      It's impossible to know for sure how the userbase feels, but the attention has certainly made the situation known to a whole lot more than 0.01% of users. And most of the closures come with a lengthy explanation exactly why it's important and generally have comments praising the action. The vocal dissenters certainly seem to be in the minority.
    • ink_13 3y ago
      Some subs held polls, and in every one that I saw, the strike was quite broadly popular. I think characterizing this as a few power mods throwing their toys out of the pram is unfair.
      • Sunspark 3y ago
        I was amused to see yesterday that my comments the day previous that some, but not all, reddit mods are paid had been silently deleted. I didn't get a bot message, they were just.. gone.. So, the corporation is watching, or the mod that is a reddit employee in the sub deleted them. I was also surprised to see yesterday that this same large sub I made them in was blacked out. Virtue-signalling? Throwing a bone to volunteer co-mods in the sub? Against the API changes? Who knows. Big mess now. Tech people don't like change, but when they get mad, wheels start turning.
        • czx4f4bd 3y ago
          Your comments disappeared because the sub went private. Reddit won't show any comments from private subs you aren't allowed to view, even comments that you made.
          • Sunspark 3y ago
            I didn't know that. Thanks for the info. This seems like bad coding design that one cannot see their own history as it is disappeared externally via the actions of a sub.
      • jordanpg 3y ago
        Yes, but the "strike" is temporary, so there's no real sacrifice. That's the main reason I think this whole thing is silly. Like any activism that actually accomplishes anything, it must be sustained and involve real sacrifice to work. This is just "raising awareness," which I guess it has done, but it's easy enough for Reddit to just batten down the hatches and wait for it to blow over, which it will. It's no different than when you hear about A march planned for this or that cause.
• nemo44x 3y ago
  > its only Extremely Online people who care about this Insider Baseball stuff I think this is the case for many things. And I imagine people will/are get wise to it. Elon Musk I think figured this out when he did what he did with Twitter. Some very online people really cared and made a lot of noise and the very online part of the media that cares made a lot of noise. But those people don't really matter and the media side has declining ratings year after year as they become more and more irrelevant. I think the paper tigers are starting to be exposed and they had a good run for the last 10 years by being very online and making a lot of noise. But ultimately, their voices don't matter.
  • watwut 3y ago
    It really does not seem to me that Musk figured anything out. He is loosing both money and users at massive speed.
    • nemo44x 3y ago
      They have a higher user count than they’ve ever had breaking their own MAU records. Advertising will come back. There’s anti-Twitter pressure campaigns and for economic reasons ad spend slowed. It’s all coming back. He controls the worlds largest and most important megaphone. That’s priceless.
      • watwut 3y ago
        > They have a higher user count than they’ve ever had breaking their own MAU records. Yeah, because the bots and spam area largely out of control. There is significantly much more of it them used to be. And no, ads did not went down because of pressure campaigns, but because of serious mismanagement of ad accounts.
      • callalex 3y ago
        It’s easy to make your MAU go up when you fire all the anti-bot teams.
    • FormerBandmate 3y ago
• tedivm 3y ago
  Sure, but without those moderators there's not much of a site. I don't spent a lot of time thinking about trash collection, but if all the garbage on my street stopped being collected I'd absolutely notice.
  • nightski 3y ago
    You are probably right, but at the same time there are probably plenty of people willing to step in and take their place.
    • ntaylor 3y ago
      The truth is that there are many, many niche communities where this is simply not true. Whole sections of reddit will die off due to lack of moderation and people will be forced to go elsewhere. This may not be a killing blow for reddit, but it will be devastating to the communities that it impacts.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • edgyquant 3y ago
        Every community you’re talking about has users who would love to replace the mod team.
        • jachee 3y ago
          So that they, too, can get treated like crap by reddit? I don’t buy it.
          • edgyquant 3y ago
            No so that they can be the ones who get to ban people and shape the community.
    • EnragedParrot 3y ago
• ajmurmann 3y ago
  Worse, in at least one huge sub I follow the mods are widely hated
  • thepasswordis 3y ago
    I think that’s most subs. This is why I’m actually torn between which group I dislike the most. On the one hand, the admins are being absolute children to the mods. But that said: most (all?) if the Reddit mods I have interacted with are also overgrown children. The “mods vs admins” thing seems like two toddlers screaming at each other. It’s at a point where I kind of want both sides to lose. Something in the culture changed 4-5 years ago where being a mod went from a job where you remove spam posts, to a role where you decide what is allowed for discussion. On my city subreddit, for instance, they’ve gotten it to the point where practically anything which isn’t a photo of a sunset is seen as off topic and removed. And then there’s stuff like: mods will decide to “lock” threads they don’t like. There was a discussion on /r/Catholicism talking about an anti-Catholic group being invited, then uninvited, then reinvited to perform at a baseball game. After a few hours of discussion the mods “locked” this, meaning you couldn’t participate in it anymore. It’s extremely annoying.
    • ajmurmann 3y ago
      "On my city subreddit, for instance, they’ve gotten it to the point where practically anything which isn’t a photo of a sunset is seen as off topic and removed." hah, my reference to the one large sub where the mods are widely hated was about my city's sub which from your description might be the same. Edit: In this case, I have some empathy for the mods though, since that sub faced invasions from people outside the city who hate it.
    • evandale 3y ago
      > Something in the culture changed 4-5 years ago where being a mod went from a job where you remove spam posts, to a role where you decide what is allowed for discussion. > On my city subreddit, for instance, they’ve gotten it to the point where practically anything which isn’t a photo of a sunset is seen as off topic and removed. Yep, this is what needs fixing. My local city subreddit decided there was too much news in the city about crime and banned posting stories about crime in January. It's now June and still a rule. You can only post a story about someone committing a crime or getting arrested if their crime had a city-wide impact. There was a story about teenagers shooting fireworks off on a public bus around Victoria day this year and that post was allowed. People shat on the teenagers and said whatever they wanted about them. It got as nasty as you'd expect. The post announcing their arrest though? It turned out to be a group of POC and so the mods locked the comments within minutes because they anticipated "bad" comments and it was going to be too difficult to moderate. The other annoying thing before that was a small group of powerusers getting annoyed with people asking too many easy-to-Google questions. So a few choice posters would always come in and make the same "I recommend House of Lancaster" (a strip club with a reputation) for every question that got asked. It didn't matter what the question was, there was at least 1 house of Lancaster suggestion. It turned into a meme, the moderators noticed people were hostile to newcomers, and rather than outlawing being hostile to people they banned questions! It’s _extremely_ annoying.
• badRNG 3y ago
  <1% of Reddit users make the content that provides value to the site. This 1% is disproportionately likely to know who spez is and care about his shenanigans. Even less perform the moderation tasks that keep the site running, and they basically all care about this change.
  • edgyquant 3y ago
    Source for this? I think this is a commonly spouted stat that applied to non-social media websites. I have trouble believing social media sites have the same demographic makeup.
    • badRNG 3y ago
      It's a pretty well-known rule [0]. There's a good post about this in r/dataisbeautiful, but it is currently private. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
• AdamN 3y ago
  The proof will be in the pudding. Reddit will survive but unless they back down, alot of people will leave permanently. What surprises me is how lackadaisical the board appears to be - so much money is being left on the table. I would be livid if I was an investor.
• EnragedParrot 3y ago
  That's a valid point, but on the flip side, Reddit's content is user driven, and 99% of users never post or contribute anything, they're just on the site to consume content posted by that 1% of power users. Those power users are really the "extremely online" people who are angry about this. If you don't have moderators running subreddits and power users posting quality content, reddit doesn't have a product.
• thomascgalvin 3y ago
  People on Reddit vastly overestimate how closely Reddit's opinion lines up with that of the general public. If the last US Presidential election was held on Reddit, Bernie Sanders would have won in a landslide. He obviously did not. When Netflix announced it was cracking down on password sharing, Reddit declared that this would be the final nail in their coffin. Instead, subscriptions skyrocketed. Reddit power users are angry at spez and claim that this will be the end of the site, but the average Reddit user has maybe heard about all of this, and mostly doesn't care.
• marricks 3y ago
  > 99.99% of reddit users have no idea who spez is That's why people do things like black outs and protests, so people can learn who people are and what is happening. > probably wouldn't care if they learned about his shenanigans That's information is associated with protests, so people can decide if they care. I can actually understand how most wouldn't care about this. This change isn't that important to me except in that's it's another stepping stone on the death of the free and open web. Twitter API, Reddit API, real ID on Facebook, probably countless other things. What we expected to have in the 2010's is going fast.