4 ms·

If you don't pay for it, it's not your community. Again and again people think they get something for free, which they don't. If it's free you're a volunteer fo

If you don't pay for it, it's not your community. Again and again people think they get something for free, which they don't. If it's free you're a volunteer for the company, if you pay you're a customer.

Scalene2 3y ago
Reddit management would do well to understand that with regards to the labour and content they receive for free.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  This type of content is always free... For your general audience, there is plenty of enough of it always. And with comments even too much. You never really need to pay monetary value for it.
  - themoonisachees 3y ago
    It isn't though. Facebook and Twitter have paid moderators that are employees, but since they are uninterested in building communities with quality content, you just end up with what they are today.
makeitdouble 3y ago
Additionally if you pay for it you're a customer, and it's still not your community, you still accepted a contract that probably allows the company to do pretty much anything, and they can pull the rug at any point.
- wnkrshm 3y ago
  If you pay, your data set is just worth more (Edit: to the company), since it proves you have money and can be made to spend it.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kristopolous 3y ago
The people here thinking they got something for free is Reddit management. If the roles these moderators played start looking like it was a form of work that's employee misclassification and backpay time.
- tbatchelli 3y ago
  Interesting thought. If they can be fired, they were employed.
  - max51 3y ago
    By that definition, almost every user on every social media platform would be an "employee". What reddit mods are doing is really not that different from creating a facebook group to organise a party with your friend or a twitter page to share curated content that you love. Mods don't work for reddit, they work for their community/subreddit. Creating a group on a social media platform doesn't make you an employee that can be fired. It makes you a power user that can get banned if you mess with other users/communities or with the platform too much.
    - kristopolous 3y ago
      I know one person personally who is a mod. It sure does look like work. He is effectively on-call and always tending to fires. I can imagine this to be a minority but yeah, I thought of it as "his job"
freddie_mercury 3y ago
Paying for it doesn't make it your community, either, whatever that even means. Just look at the old AOL keywords. People paid for AOL. Didn't matter. Even in a community, the majority can choose to do things you don't like, just ask anyone who lives in an HOA.
- KingOfCoders 3y ago
  AOL moderators didn't pay from my recollection. And they were therefor screwed the same way Reddit moderators were (My neighbour back then was an AOL moderator, forgot how they were called)
BeefWellington 3y ago
They aren't getting something for free. They're getting something in exchange for being exposed to advertising.
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
What kind of communities are you a part of that you pay for? All the best ones that I can think of have never involved money moving around at all--participation makes a community, not money.
- abhibeckert 3y ago
  It's pretty common in meatspace for communities to have membership fees. I'm part of a community theatre that charges members $20 per year. The membership fee makes you legally a shareholder in the organisation for that year, with voting rights at an annual election where new management is voted in. There's usually only 50 or so people who vote (most members can't be bothered), so $20 gets you a substantial amount of influence if you can be bothered. Last year's management are required to step down before the vote starts, making them regular members with a single vote during the re-election process. Usually it's mostly the same people voted back in, but there's always two or three new faces each year.
- KingOfCoders 3y ago
  I was mostly taking about the moderators, because of the use of "their" in the title: "Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private" I have been paying for wiki hosting in the past to create a community (I prefer open source so I've created a much used open source Wiki engine that I and others used for hosting their communities[1]), I've payed for Discourse community hosting, I pay for newsletter hosting [2]. The providers in these cases could not remove me from "my" communities, they could not take "my" (our) content. [1] One was called Javangelist, long gone but funnily you can find links to it on C2 https://wiki.c2.com/?IcebergSecret https://wiki.c2.com/?IcebergSecret [2] I create a CTO community around https://www.amazingcto.com/cto-newsletter/ https://www.amazingcto.com/cto-newsletter/
- kristopolous 3y ago
  metafilter does that. It limits the user-base to those who have command of a bank-account or credit-card and imposes a friction on new account creation by gating it with a one-time $5 fee. They never aspired to be huge but I think they're doing fine.
- 3y ago
Gigachad 3y ago
Goes the other way. Reddit isn't paying the mods who run these communities. Without all this unpaid labor, the site can not function.
wellthisisgreat 3y ago
> If you don't pay for it, it's not your community. Again and again people think they get something for free, which they don't. Reddit should have thought about it shouldn’t they? Not paying mods and content creators means it’s not their content and people don’t have to listen to a handful of glorified web developers.
abhibeckert 3y ago
That knife cuts both ways - Reddit hasn't paid anyone to write valuable content for their platform, which means they don't really own the content and it can be taken away. A lot of people are leaving reddit over this.
zik 3y ago
The thing is though that I _do_ pay for it. I'm a long time paying subscriber to reddit and I think I should be able to use the Reddit Sync app like I have for years. But that's not an option that's on the table. I should say that I used to be a paying subscriber. Not after this I'm not. Now I'm on lemmy.
paulmd 3y ago
The problem is that people don't even agree on what "it" is. Low friction of cross-board collaboration increases the spam problem. There will be low quality instances in a federated world. Other people really really just want to post about woodworking or whatever and the federation thing is not interesting at all. Nobody wants a feed without content in it anymore than staring at an empty email account, so you kind of need one of those things to jumpstart it. There are so many different niches out of what people want out of a reddit replacement though. Some people want anonymous, some don't, some want local mod curation, others want a very broad push-based thing with lots of server feeding, and there are a lot of these underlying disagreements that are underlying a lot of the "what would replace it" thing. It's always fun until someone starts shitflooding gore and the mods on that server don't handle it and there's some other problem that's the fifth this week. Let alone if you are dependent on nobody else in your group importing them etc. Reputation matters and if your pod is disruptive that doesn't mean anyone decent will federate with you. And your posts could go much farther than intended. I still think Discord has nailed the social model that is necessary here. Smaller communities with people you know, local control and moderation. But that's not necessarily ActivityPub.
- jimbob45 3y ago
  4chan has a pretty tidy solution by having 10x as many janitors as mods. The janitors recommend posts/threads for deletion but the mods hold the ultimate power. Even better with a functional reporting system.
  - junon 3y ago
    How do you think reddit works, my guy?
flarg 3y ago
They did pay for it, with free labour.
leokennis 3y ago
Well Reddit hasn’t paid me shit for my contributions to the Reddit community. You’re right! By your correct reasoning, Reddit does not own their community, they’re just a consumer of it! You seem to think that the users need Reddit more than that Reddit needs its users. I think it’s exactly the other way around.
mrpopo 3y ago
Wikipedia is free, Linux is free, walking by the river is free. Why do people insist we must pay for nice things?
- themoonisachees 3y ago
  Ironically, making something good for free shows me goodwill and makes me more likely to pay for it.
npteljes 3y ago
Why does paying for it making it better? Companies can screw paying customers over too. The issue is depending on a third party like this. And the solution is not some free tech utopia either. Taking risks is part of life, and so when screwed over like this, the parties involved just need to re-assess the situation and move on. And count on being screwed over next time too.

Scalene2 3y ago

Reddit management would do well to understand that with regards to the labour and content they receive for free.

Ekaros 3y ago
This type of content is always free... For your general audience, there is plenty of enough of it always. And with comments even too much. You never really need to pay monetary value for it.
- themoonisachees 3y ago
  It isn't though. Facebook and Twitter have paid moderators that are employees, but since they are uninterested in building communities with quality content, you just end up with what they are today.

makeitdouble 3y ago

Additionally if you pay for it you're a customer, and it's still not your community, you still accepted a contract that probably allows the company to do pretty much anything, and they can pull the rug at any point.

wnkrshm 3y ago
If you pay, your data set is just worth more (Edit: to the company), since it proves you have money and can be made to spend it.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

kristopolous 3y ago

The people here thinking they got something for free is Reddit management. If the roles these moderators played start looking like it was a form of work that's employee misclassification and backpay time.

tbatchelli 3y ago
Interesting thought. If they can be fired, they were employed.
- max51 3y ago
  By that definition, almost every user on every social media platform would be an "employee". What reddit mods are doing is really not that different from creating a facebook group to organise a party with your friend or a twitter page to share curated content that you love. Mods don't work for reddit, they work for their community/subreddit. Creating a group on a social media platform doesn't make you an employee that can be fired. It makes you a power user that can get banned if you mess with other users/communities or with the platform too much.
  - kristopolous 3y ago
    I know one person personally who is a mod. It sure does look like work. He is effectively on-call and always tending to fires. I can imagine this to be a minority but yeah, I thought of it as "his job"

freddie_mercury 3y ago

Paying for it doesn't make it your community, either, whatever that even means. Just look at the old AOL keywords. People paid for AOL. Didn't matter. Even in a community, the majority can choose to do things you don't like, just ask anyone who lives in an HOA.

KingOfCoders 3y ago
AOL moderators didn't pay from my recollection. And they were therefor screwed the same way Reddit moderators were (My neighbour back then was an AOL moderator, forgot how they were called)

BeefWellington 3y ago

They aren't getting something for free. They're getting something in exchange for being exposed to advertising.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago

What kind of communities are you a part of that you pay for? All the best ones that I can think of have never involved money moving around at all--participation makes a community, not money.

abhibeckert 3y ago
It's pretty common in meatspace for communities to have membership fees. I'm part of a community theatre that charges members $20 per year. The membership fee makes you legally a shareholder in the organisation for that year, with voting rights at an annual election where new management is voted in. There's usually only 50 or so people who vote (most members can't be bothered), so $20 gets you a substantial amount of influence if you can be bothered. Last year's management are required to step down before the vote starts, making them regular members with a single vote during the re-election process. Usually it's mostly the same people voted back in, but there's always two or three new faces each year.
KingOfCoders 3y ago
I was mostly taking about the moderators, because of the use of "their" in the title: "Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private" I have been paying for wiki hosting in the past to create a community (I prefer open source so I've created a much used open source Wiki engine that I and others used for hosting their communities[1]), I've payed for Discourse community hosting, I pay for newsletter hosting [2]. The providers in these cases could not remove me from "my" communities, they could not take "my" (our) content. [1] One was called Javangelist, long gone but funnily you can find links to it on C2 https://wiki.c2.com/?IcebergSecret https://wiki.c2.com/?IcebergSecret [2] I create a CTO community around https://www.amazingcto.com/cto-newsletter/ https://www.amazingcto.com/cto-newsletter/
kristopolous 3y ago
metafilter does that. It limits the user-base to those who have command of a bank-account or credit-card and imposes a friction on new account creation by gating it with a one-time $5 fee. They never aspired to be huge but I think they're doing fine.
3y ago

Gigachad 3y ago

Goes the other way. Reddit isn't paying the mods who run these communities. Without all this unpaid labor, the site can not function.

wellthisisgreat 3y ago

> If you don't pay for it, it's not your community. Again and again people think they get something for free, which they don't. Reddit should have thought about it shouldn’t they? Not paying mods and content creators means it’s not their content and people don’t have to listen to a handful of glorified web developers.

abhibeckert 3y ago

That knife cuts both ways - Reddit hasn't paid anyone to write valuable content for their platform, which means they don't really own the content and it can be taken away. A lot of people are leaving reddit over this.

zik 3y ago

The thing is though that I _do_ pay for it. I'm a long time paying subscriber to reddit and I think I should be able to use the Reddit Sync app like I have for years. But that's not an option that's on the table. I should say that I used to be a paying subscriber. Not after this I'm not. Now I'm on lemmy.

paulmd 3y ago

The problem is that people don't even agree on what "it" is. Low friction of cross-board collaboration increases the spam problem. There will be low quality instances in a federated world. Other people really really just want to post about woodworking or whatever and the federation thing is not interesting at all. Nobody wants a feed without content in it anymore than staring at an empty email account, so you kind of need one of those things to jumpstart it. There are so many different niches out of what people want out of a reddit replacement though. Some people want anonymous, some don't, some want local mod curation, others want a very broad push-based thing with lots of server feeding, and there are a lot of these underlying disagreements that are underlying a lot of the "what would replace it" thing. It's always fun until someone starts shitflooding gore and the mods on that server don't handle it and there's some other problem that's the fifth this week. Let alone if you are dependent on nobody else in your group importing them etc. Reputation matters and if your pod is disruptive that doesn't mean anyone decent will federate with you. And your posts could go much farther than intended. I still think Discord has nailed the social model that is necessary here. Smaller communities with people you know, local control and moderation. But that's not necessarily ActivityPub.

jimbob45 3y ago
4chan has a pretty tidy solution by having 10x as many janitors as mods. The janitors recommend posts/threads for deletion but the mods hold the ultimate power. Even better with a functional reporting system.
- junon 3y ago
  How do you think reddit works, my guy?

flarg 3y ago

They did pay for it, with free labour.

leokennis 3y ago

Well Reddit hasn’t paid me shit for my contributions to the Reddit community. You’re right! By your correct reasoning, Reddit does not own their community, they’re just a consumer of it! You seem to think that the users need Reddit more than that Reddit needs its users. I think it’s exactly the other way around.

mrpopo 3y ago

Wikipedia is free, Linux is free, walking by the river is free. Why do people insist we must pay for nice things?

themoonisachees 3y ago
Ironically, making something good for free shows me goodwill and makes me more likely to pay for it.

npteljes 3y ago

Why does paying for it making it better? Companies can screw paying customers over too. The issue is depending on a third party like this. And the solution is not some free tech utopia either. Taking risks is part of life, and so when screwed over like this, the parties involved just need to re-assess the situation and move on. And count on being screwed over next time too.