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Yeah it’s now “oh and maybe we’ll do ‘touch grass tuesdays’ in perpetuity”. That’s an incredibly unsympathetic message imo. Get real. If anyone thinks a busine

by paulmd 3y ago

Yeah it’s now “oh and maybe we’ll do ‘touch grass tuesdays’ in perpetuity”. That’s an incredibly unsympathetic message imo. Get real. If anyone thinks a business is going to tolerate a clique of powermods choosing to randomly shut things down according to their own schedule… they’re gonna be disappointed. Let alone I’ve seen some people thinking they can demand a hand in the corporate governance? Yeah fuck no powermods are not ever getting a seat on the board, lol, lmao. No company in the world would ever agree to that. Especially not after all of this. Yeah, they’re gonna pry the mods off and reopen things, sooner or later. Unless something changes mods are going to leave things permanently closed after the 30th and walk away, and Reddit is absolutely not going to tolerate that. But there’s no reason to wait that long really. The 5 mods running an average of 18 top-100 subs each are not going to be as tough to replace as people think they are, the reality is at that scale you’re not managing anything operationally on a day to day level, you’re setting up a script. It’s the lower-level jannies that will be the trouble, because they’re the ones doing the actual work, not the person claiming to mod 200 million subscribers worth of content. And at the end of the day you can find some people willing to click “delete” on spam while they’re scrolling. That’s plausible if they can get over the bump gracefully. And truth is there’s always people willing to do it for the prestige, even as pitiful as that is. The Reddit play here is obviously to pry the powermods off, get the frontpage subs back open, and get moderation back to some kind of a semi functional level (automated or otherwise) until it blows over and organic moderation can resume. And that’s a reasonably achievable goal. But the powermod squad needs to consider what their own exit strategy is too… nobody is going to let powermods randomly shut things down on an ongoing basis. If they’re disruptive then they put Reddit in a position of being forced to remove them, it is what it is, Reddit can’t operate with a cabal of a half dozen users able to shut down the front page at will either. If Reddit doesn’t have a fundamental belief in the powermods being good-faith players they are gone regardless of the consequences, because the alternative is unacceptable. They will deal with the consequences and move forward, most likely successfully. People act like Spez is somehow out of line and they can just get him tossed out, like the board is going to sign off on letting a bunch of agitators disrupt operations on an ongoing and indefinite basis.

yanderekko 3y ago
Importantly, the powerjannies aren't a monolithic bloc, and many of them are already vocally critical of the notion of an ongoing blackout. I'd expect that they know that if some of them get removed then other powermods will eagerly move in to claim their territories. There's not going to be some sort of class solidarity here - continuing the protests will be tantamount to resigning as a mod, you're just being dramatic about it.
dale_glass 3y ago
They can do that of course, but if they do so, I'm leaving. Basically what I do on Reddit is to subscribe to the vision of a given group of mods. They're the ones I come to the site for, not Reddit the company. Eg, r/AskHistorians is good because it's run with an iron fist by the mods. When I come there I come seeking precisely that -- a well curated content archive that contains all wheat and zero chaff. If Reddit forces them off, and they create www.askhistorians.com, then I'm making a account there.
- paulmd 3y ago
  And that’s fine because the commercial value of Reddit is not in r/AskHistorians, it’s in r/aww and r/earthporn and r/mildlyinteresting. People don’t get it, Reddit is fundamentally pivoting away from being a message board and pivoting towards being TikTok. In the TikTok model your comments and discussion are not the commercially viable product. The eyeballs are the product, comments are a flavor to show that other users engaged the content. You know how New Reddit doesn’t show you the comments very well? Think about that in this context - the comments are no longer what matters anymore. And it’s ultimately not that hard to generate enough reasonably compelling content to keep people scrolling on those mindless frontpage subs. People will happily repost tumblr and TikTok just like they did a month ago. There will be a short term dip and in 6 months it’ll be completely back to normal. People are fundamentally making a mistake here and thinking theres a scenario where the Reddit they knew 10 years ago will still exist in a year. It already has been dead for a couple years, and it is going to pivot even harder towards shallow content and mindless scrolling, user comments are not something they can commercialize. It’s not that “Spez doesn’t get it!!!” it’s actually the users who don’t get it. Yeah they’re going to lose 10-20% of their users, they know. And they’re going to make 5x or 10x the revenue on the remaining 80%. Yes, it will be bland and suck for you, and it will make them a shitload of money. Not sure why this is so confusing for people - they don’t want you as the customer anymore. So long and good luck. If users want to stay, customize their feed for whatever keeps their own eyeballs engaged, great. But Reddit can’t commercialize it unless it’s on a first party app or website. The mod stuff is fixable and they’ve said they’ll be flexible on that (not that it makes anyone happy), but average users will not be consuming Reddit on a 3rd party app in a year, period.

by paulmd 3y ago

yanderekko 3y ago

Importantly, the powerjannies aren't a monolithic bloc, and many of them are already vocally critical of the notion of an ongoing blackout. I'd expect that they know that if some of them get removed then other powermods will eagerly move in to claim their territories. There's not going to be some sort of class solidarity here - continuing the protests will be tantamount to resigning as a mod, you're just being dramatic about it.

dale_glass 3y ago

They can do that of course, but if they do so, I'm leaving. Basically what I do on Reddit is to subscribe to the vision of a given group of mods. They're the ones I come to the site for, not Reddit the company. Eg, r/AskHistorians is good because it's run with an iron fist by the mods. When I come there I come seeking precisely that -- a well curated content archive that contains all wheat and zero chaff. If Reddit forces them off, and they create www.askhistorians.com, then I'm making a account there.

paulmd 3y ago
And that’s fine because the commercial value of Reddit is not in r/AskHistorians, it’s in r/aww and r/earthporn and r/mildlyinteresting. People don’t get it, Reddit is fundamentally pivoting away from being a message board and pivoting towards being TikTok. In the TikTok model your comments and discussion are not the commercially viable product. The eyeballs are the product, comments are a flavor to show that other users engaged the content. You know how New Reddit doesn’t show you the comments very well? Think about that in this context - the comments are no longer what matters anymore. And it’s ultimately not that hard to generate enough reasonably compelling content to keep people scrolling on those mindless frontpage subs. People will happily repost tumblr and TikTok just like they did a month ago. There will be a short term dip and in 6 months it’ll be completely back to normal. People are fundamentally making a mistake here and thinking theres a scenario where the Reddit they knew 10 years ago will still exist in a year. It already has been dead for a couple years, and it is going to pivot even harder towards shallow content and mindless scrolling, user comments are not something they can commercialize. It’s not that “Spez doesn’t get it!!!” it’s actually the users who don’t get it. Yeah they’re going to lose 10-20% of their users, they know. And they’re going to make 5x or 10x the revenue on the remaining 80%. Yes, it will be bland and suck for you, and it will make them a shitload of money. Not sure why this is so confusing for people - they don’t want you as the customer anymore. So long and good luck. If users want to stay, customize their feed for whatever keeps their own eyeballs engaged, great. But Reddit can’t commercialize it unless it’s on a first party app or website. The mod stuff is fixable and they’ve said they’ll be flexible on that (not that it makes anyone happy), but average users will not be consuming Reddit on a 3rd party app in a year, period.