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Reddit could have avoided all of this years ago by building out the tools that moderators claim to need. Instead, they relied on third parties to create them. D

Reddit could have avoided all of this years ago by building out the tools that moderators claim to need. Instead, they relied on third parties to create them. Doing this would have nullified mods’ strongest justification for protesting. While removing 3rd party apps is certainly annoying for users, mods are what keep the site functioning. The fact that Reddit chose to take this course of action tells me that they don’t actually know that much about their own website. That might also explain why they never built out the tooling to begin with.

jfasi 3y ago
> Doing this would have nullified mods’ strongest justification for protesting Reddit has announced they're providing carveouts for apps that provide critical moderation tools, that justification is already gone.
- justinjlynn 3y ago
  Non-concessions dangled (that were never demanded as dangled but which most observers think were) are far more effective than demanded concessions given. Your comment illustrates that nicely.
- jjulius 3y ago
  Uhh, not according to mods as of two days ago... https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/148ks6u/indefinite_blackout_next_steps_polling_your/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/148ks6u/indefinit...
  - jfasi 3y ago
    https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/16693988535309 https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/16693988535309
    - jjulius 3y ago
      So, "moderator bots and other tooling using our Data API" and concerns around that "[falling] into the free API tier" is definitely not the only issue cited in the link I provided. Edit: Not only that, shifting mod tools to the free tier doesn't magically solve the fiscal issue third-party apps have and will still result in them shutting down. A huge part of the reason mods use those third-party apps is because Reddit's own app doesn't provide the tools they want/need. To the point of the other person who responded to you, Reddit has absolutely dangled a carrot that does nothing in an effort to seem like they're being helpful.
jupp0r 3y ago
I can't prove this, but I believe that being an open platform with lots of cool apps built around it used to be what drove its power users towards using Reddit in the first place.
- wmeredith 3y ago
  Twitter was the same way. Then they kicked that community to the curb. It’ll happen again.
  - foobarbecue 3y ago
    Remember when Facebook had a thriving app community? With that farming game and the Scrabble thing? It's certainly a pattern.
- idop 3y ago
  That was one thing. I think the biggest thing was that in Reddit you got to chose the type of content you wanted to see. You more or less curated your own feed. The moment Reddit started shoving "You might like this" into the website, I knew it was soon to be over. Reddit no longer wants you to choose what to see, it wants to decide for you, like all other social media websites. And the reasoning is unassailable, all those other websites have made their owners obscenely rich, so why not /u/spez too?
mlyle 3y ago
The richest part here is where spez refers to moderators as a "landed gentry": https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blackout-ceo-steve-huffman-moderators-rcna89544 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blacko... “And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.” What does that make spez relative to the constituents in his community?
- hn_thrwn 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - consilient 3y ago
    That would be its investors.
  - bloqs 3y ago
    Rent a storefront Get people to run and supply it for free Sell the supplies and profit
    - piyh 3y ago
      Build a platform Recruit free labor Replace them when they stop working
  - hughesjj 3y ago
    Well, except the mods, he doesn't pay them. Or the people who made moderator tooling to hack around his lack of moderator tooling. Or those who wrote entire third party apps to get around his lack of viable third party apps. Or those people who had to implement accessibility for the blind or otherwise disabled to get around his lack of tooling for the blind or otherwise disabled. But besides all those people, yeah he pays the bills. Well okay he doesn't actually pay anything, it's the investors and advertisers that pay the actual bills. But other than all that spez contributes by.... Uhh ..... Lowering server costs by causing a mass exodus?
  - 3y ago
agilob 3y ago
>Reddit could have avoided all of this years ago by building out the tools that moderators claim to need. I moderate a small subreddit and don't even know what tools they are talking about. I don't want to say goodbye to RedReader.
- ryeguy 3y ago
  Good news, red reader was granted an accessibility exemption so it's sticking around.
BeefWellington 3y ago
The kicker here is, if this is all for an IPO, as an investor, would these moves give you more confidence in the leadership or less? I can kinda see arguments for both directions, but I can think of more that would cause me to have less confidence. The biggest IMO is that what's happening here is a gamble by leadership that people are so drawn to Reddit that they'll give up their far superior mobile apps or desktop experiences for it. The second biggest is the speed with which they pushed this decision. By forcing it to happen so quickly and not offering an actually sufficient grace period, it's pretty clear this is just about trying to fatten up for the IPO and doesn't represent solid medium to long-term thinking and direction. Maybe investors won't care. Maybe users are truly too hooked to Reddit specifically to leave, as we've seen mostly play out with Twitter.
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
  What if the intent is to increase brand and impending IPO awareness? Investors don’t care about ethics, and they’re well aware that the majority of users won’t care about this decision.
- HlessClaudesman 3y ago
  Various sovereign wealth / fund manager types like the idea of a compliant userbase under their thumb. Taming the internet is the whole point.
- dimmke 3y ago
  That’s definitely the part I don’t understand. They have actively been stomping out the unique things they have that could make them a competitor, and are in the process of becoming a modern funnyjunk.com As an investor, what is the value here? They’re trying to play in a space occupied by giants like TikTok and Facebook and failing. It’s just hard to imagine investing in such a company.
Accujack 3y ago
>The fact that Reddit chose to take this course of action tells me that they don’t actually know that much about their own website. That might also explain why they never built out the tooling to begin with. It's seemed like that for years. They've had strong reasons to develop the site for years. The two main things they've done are build an app for phones and spend a relatively long time creating a "new" UI that changes the look of the site and provides more advertising space but has no major changes to the way the site works. It's like they don't have any idea how to actually develop the site, and they're limited to doing window dressing.
- cjs_ac 3y ago
  The visual design of the interface selects different segments humanity for the user base. That's why HN looks like this. A more 'friendly' UI attracts people who don't have much of note to say, will consume what they're given, and respond to ads more.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    Not the target market for a site who requires free writers with something to say
  - sofixa 3y ago
    > A more 'friendly' UI attracts people who don't have much of note to say, will consume what they're given, and respond to ads more. That's a weird sort of elitism. Friendly UIs attract everyone, isn't that what a friendly UI means?
    - mrtksn 3y ago
      If friendly UI attracts everyone but the other attracts specific type of people, then you will have different concentration of user types. It's a bit like casual games Vs games which are hard to master - completely different types of users.
    - suby 3y ago
      The phrasing has elements of elitism, but zooming out I don't think the idea itself is inherently elitist. One of the issues with reddit's redesign is that they made it more 'friendly' by introducing more media inline. If you have a site that allows for discussion of any topic like reddit, but optimizes for gigantic pictures and animations and by default your feed is filled with content that is more suited for that (eg, things like cat pictures), then you're absolutely going to attract a different audience than a utilitarian pure text site. People who just want to scroll through a feed of cat pictures are going to spend their time on a site optimized for it. Of course, there is overlap in interests and you'll find a lot of people who'd prefer a utilitarian site to also occasionally like scrolling through cat pictures, but it seems clear to me that the shape of the ui will cause a divergence and overall different culture on a given site. A better example for this than reddit is probably imgur -- you're almost certainly not going there for intellectual discussion, right? I think the contention here is the word friendly being a proxy for less information density and for a larger number of images / video.
hackmehoff33 3y ago
Reddit has been losing its cache and core producers since mid 2010’s. I miss the days when their was a barrier to entry of moderate intelligence to participate.
nabilhat 3y ago
To be fair, it's all consistent with Reddit's entire historical record. Dishonesty and sockpuppetry is how Reddit got off the ground in the first place. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddit-founders-made-hundreds-of-fake-profiles-so-site-looked-popular/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi... As the only surviving Reddit co-founder who failed to capitalize on the spectacular luck of launching Reddit and had to crawl back, only spez wants to claim the Jed Clampett title. Only now, in this gritty sequel, given the opportunity to coast in constant wealth and comfort for the rest of his days skimming the labors of the people actually successfully mining the lucky strike he himself failed to realize, he seems resentful, somehow. Regretful. Wants a do-over of the founding of Reddit. Reddit was a springboard to greater success for other founders (well, except that other one), why not him. What else can a discontented hillbilly founder do, but drive off the established, successful industry happily pumping money into his pockets, how else to get a do-over of the founding of Reddit. Maybe he can get it right this time.
tayo42 3y ago
Mod tools isn't the only reason, rif is so much more usable then the official reddit stuff. Like imagine if this site suddenly had a format like Instagram.
dclowd9901 3y ago
No, I think they just don’t know much about mod influence. Which makes sense: very few people are moderators (because, who would be besides power thirsty basement lords). The result is they were 1) unprepared for the negative reaction by moderators and 2) woefully blindsided by moderator influence on users and their influence on site control. Also explains why they have never put any time into developing moderator tooling.
bredren 3y ago
> ... they don’t actually know that much about their own website. That might also explain why they never built out the tooling to begin with. Its this. It starts at the top: > Huffman, also a Reddit co-founder, said he plans to pursue changes to Reddit’s moderator removal policy to allow ordinary users to vote moderators out more easily if their decisions aren’t popular. He said the new system would be more democratic and allow a wider set of people to hold moderators accountable. [1] If he had modded a big sub, like a city sub for example, he'd know that you can't actually moderate toward popular opinion. Not only because what is popular is not always sustainable. Leadership is doing the right thing even if it is not popular. But on a less obvious level, this wouldn't work because the site doesn't handle the influence of astroturfing and brigading. To even provide for fair votes would require user abuse administration tools the site clearly does not have. What a bummer. I've invested a fair amount of time into reddit. It has a lot of useful information. It is a shame it is led by this guy. This whole thing did not need to happen. It seems so common to be let down by leaders of social media companies. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14aeq5j/new_admin_post_if_a_moderator_team_unanimously/joaae9z/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14aeq5j/new_admin...
- Dah00n 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    I find these political theory arguments odd. Reddit is a corporation owned by a few wealthy VCs. There is nothing democratic or communistic or totalitarian about it
    - Dah00n 3y ago
      Yes, I agree, but I think you missed what I replied to, namely that the system would “be more democratic”.
  - monnok 3y ago
    [flagged]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wombat-man 3y ago
Well they just had to build out this completely ridiculous chat room feature and the sorta nice looking but slow redesign.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  And the.. avatars with micro transactions and possibly some NFT nonsense
  - wombat-man 3y ago
    Yeah thank god the avatars are NFTs somehow.
highmastdon 3y ago
With this in mind there’s still a viable business for third party apps; build an app so good for mods that they want to pay for it to cover the API costs. I know, it’s the undesired solution for regular users, but the goal of Reddit is to move everyone who doesn’t pay to the main channels. I still agree Reddit is making a deck move by doing this. I’m still using Alien Blue and even though there’s been no updates it still works, and will probably break when the new API structure lands, of which I’m really sad. I will probably not be using Reddit at all anymore as this is the only entry I’ve had for the past decade.

jfasi 3y ago

> Doing this would have nullified mods’ strongest justification for protesting Reddit has announced they're providing carveouts for apps that provide critical moderation tools, that justification is already gone.

justinjlynn 3y ago
Non-concessions dangled (that were never demanded as dangled but which most observers think were) are far more effective than demanded concessions given. Your comment illustrates that nicely.
jjulius 3y ago
Uhh, not according to mods as of two days ago... https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/148ks6u/indefinite_blackout_next_steps_polling_your/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/148ks6u/indefinit...
- jfasi 3y ago
  https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/16693988535309 https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/16693988535309
  - jjulius 3y ago
    So, "moderator bots and other tooling using our Data API" and concerns around that "[falling] into the free API tier" is definitely not the only issue cited in the link I provided. Edit: Not only that, shifting mod tools to the free tier doesn't magically solve the fiscal issue third-party apps have and will still result in them shutting down. A huge part of the reason mods use those third-party apps is because Reddit's own app doesn't provide the tools they want/need. To the point of the other person who responded to you, Reddit has absolutely dangled a carrot that does nothing in an effort to seem like they're being helpful.

jupp0r 3y ago

I can't prove this, but I believe that being an open platform with lots of cool apps built around it used to be what drove its power users towards using Reddit in the first place.

wmeredith 3y ago
Twitter was the same way. Then they kicked that community to the curb. It’ll happen again.
- foobarbecue 3y ago
  Remember when Facebook had a thriving app community? With that farming game and the Scrabble thing? It's certainly a pattern.
idop 3y ago
That was one thing. I think the biggest thing was that in Reddit you got to chose the type of content you wanted to see. You more or less curated your own feed. The moment Reddit started shoving "You might like this" into the website, I knew it was soon to be over. Reddit no longer wants you to choose what to see, it wants to decide for you, like all other social media websites. And the reasoning is unassailable, all those other websites have made their owners obscenely rich, so why not /u/spez too?

mlyle 3y ago

The richest part here is where spez refers to moderators as a "landed gentry": https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blackout-ceo-steve-huffman-moderators-rcna89544 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blacko... “And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.” What does that make spez relative to the constituents in his community?

hn_thrwn 3y ago
[flagged]
- consilient 3y ago
  That would be its investors.
- bloqs 3y ago
  Rent a storefront Get people to run and supply it for free Sell the supplies and profit
  - piyh 3y ago
    Build a platform Recruit free labor Replace them when they stop working
- hughesjj 3y ago
  Well, except the mods, he doesn't pay them. Or the people who made moderator tooling to hack around his lack of moderator tooling. Or those who wrote entire third party apps to get around his lack of viable third party apps. Or those people who had to implement accessibility for the blind or otherwise disabled to get around his lack of tooling for the blind or otherwise disabled. But besides all those people, yeah he pays the bills. Well okay he doesn't actually pay anything, it's the investors and advertisers that pay the actual bills. But other than all that spez contributes by.... Uhh ..... Lowering server costs by causing a mass exodus?
- 3y ago

agilob 3y ago

>Reddit could have avoided all of this years ago by building out the tools that moderators claim to need. I moderate a small subreddit and don't even know what tools they are talking about. I don't want to say goodbye to RedReader.

ryeguy 3y ago
Good news, red reader was granted an accessibility exemption so it's sticking around.

BeefWellington 3y ago

The kicker here is, if this is all for an IPO, as an investor, would these moves give you more confidence in the leadership or less? I can kinda see arguments for both directions, but I can think of more that would cause me to have less confidence. The biggest IMO is that what's happening here is a gamble by leadership that people are so drawn to Reddit that they'll give up their far superior mobile apps or desktop experiences for it. The second biggest is the speed with which they pushed this decision. By forcing it to happen so quickly and not offering an actually sufficient grace period, it's pretty clear this is just about trying to fatten up for the IPO and doesn't represent solid medium to long-term thinking and direction. Maybe investors won't care. Maybe users are truly too hooked to Reddit specifically to leave, as we've seen mostly play out with Twitter.

hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
What if the intent is to increase brand and impending IPO awareness? Investors don’t care about ethics, and they’re well aware that the majority of users won’t care about this decision.
HlessClaudesman 3y ago
Various sovereign wealth / fund manager types like the idea of a compliant userbase under their thumb. Taming the internet is the whole point.
dimmke 3y ago
That’s definitely the part I don’t understand. They have actively been stomping out the unique things they have that could make them a competitor, and are in the process of becoming a modern funnyjunk.com As an investor, what is the value here? They’re trying to play in a space occupied by giants like TikTok and Facebook and failing. It’s just hard to imagine investing in such a company.

Accujack 3y ago

>The fact that Reddit chose to take this course of action tells me that they don’t actually know that much about their own website. That might also explain why they never built out the tooling to begin with. It's seemed like that for years. They've had strong reasons to develop the site for years. The two main things they've done are build an app for phones and spend a relatively long time creating a "new" UI that changes the look of the site and provides more advertising space but has no major changes to the way the site works. It's like they don't have any idea how to actually develop the site, and they're limited to doing window dressing.

cjs_ac 3y ago
The visual design of the interface selects different segments humanity for the user base. That's why HN looks like this. A more 'friendly' UI attracts people who don't have much of note to say, will consume what they're given, and respond to ads more.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  Not the target market for a site who requires free writers with something to say
- sofixa 3y ago
  > A more 'friendly' UI attracts people who don't have much of note to say, will consume what they're given, and respond to ads more. That's a weird sort of elitism. Friendly UIs attract everyone, isn't that what a friendly UI means?
  - mrtksn 3y ago
    If friendly UI attracts everyone but the other attracts specific type of people, then you will have different concentration of user types. It's a bit like casual games Vs games which are hard to master - completely different types of users.
  - suby 3y ago
    The phrasing has elements of elitism, but zooming out I don't think the idea itself is inherently elitist. One of the issues with reddit's redesign is that they made it more 'friendly' by introducing more media inline. If you have a site that allows for discussion of any topic like reddit, but optimizes for gigantic pictures and animations and by default your feed is filled with content that is more suited for that (eg, things like cat pictures), then you're absolutely going to attract a different audience than a utilitarian pure text site. People who just want to scroll through a feed of cat pictures are going to spend their time on a site optimized for it. Of course, there is overlap in interests and you'll find a lot of people who'd prefer a utilitarian site to also occasionally like scrolling through cat pictures, but it seems clear to me that the shape of the ui will cause a divergence and overall different culture on a given site. A better example for this than reddit is probably imgur -- you're almost certainly not going there for intellectual discussion, right? I think the contention here is the word friendly being a proxy for less information density and for a larger number of images / video.

hackmehoff33 3y ago

Reddit has been losing its cache and core producers since mid 2010’s. I miss the days when their was a barrier to entry of moderate intelligence to participate.

nabilhat 3y ago

To be fair, it's all consistent with Reddit's entire historical record. Dishonesty and sockpuppetry is how Reddit got off the ground in the first place. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddit-founders-made-hundreds-of-fake-profiles-so-site-looked-popular/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi... As the only surviving Reddit co-founder who failed to capitalize on the spectacular luck of launching Reddit and had to crawl back, only spez wants to claim the Jed Clampett title. Only now, in this gritty sequel, given the opportunity to coast in constant wealth and comfort for the rest of his days skimming the labors of the people actually successfully mining the lucky strike he himself failed to realize, he seems resentful, somehow. Regretful. Wants a do-over of the founding of Reddit. Reddit was a springboard to greater success for other founders (well, except that other one), why not him. What else can a discontented hillbilly founder do, but drive off the established, successful industry happily pumping money into his pockets, how else to get a do-over of the founding of Reddit. Maybe he can get it right this time.

tayo42 3y ago

Mod tools isn't the only reason, rif is so much more usable then the official reddit stuff. Like imagine if this site suddenly had a format like Instagram.

dclowd9901 3y ago

No, I think they just don’t know much about mod influence. Which makes sense: very few people are moderators (because, who would be besides power thirsty basement lords). The result is they were 1) unprepared for the negative reaction by moderators and 2) woefully blindsided by moderator influence on users and their influence on site control. Also explains why they have never put any time into developing moderator tooling.

bredren 3y ago

> ... they don’t actually know that much about their own website. That might also explain why they never built out the tooling to begin with. Its this. It starts at the top: > Huffman, also a Reddit co-founder, said he plans to pursue changes to Reddit’s moderator removal policy to allow ordinary users to vote moderators out more easily if their decisions aren’t popular. He said the new system would be more democratic and allow a wider set of people to hold moderators accountable. [1] If he had modded a big sub, like a city sub for example, he'd know that you can't actually moderate toward popular opinion. Not only because what is popular is not always sustainable. Leadership is doing the right thing even if it is not popular. But on a less obvious level, this wouldn't work because the site doesn't handle the influence of astroturfing and brigading. To even provide for fair votes would require user abuse administration tools the site clearly does not have. What a bummer. I've invested a fair amount of time into reddit. It has a lot of useful information. It is a shame it is led by this guy. This whole thing did not need to happen. It seems so common to be let down by leaders of social media companies. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14aeq5j/new_admin_post_if_a_moderator_team_unanimously/joaae9z/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14aeq5j/new_admin...

Dah00n 3y ago
[flagged]
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  I find these political theory arguments odd. Reddit is a corporation owned by a few wealthy VCs. There is nothing democratic or communistic or totalitarian about it
  - Dah00n 3y ago
    Yes, I agree, but I think you missed what I replied to, namely that the system would “be more democratic”.
- monnok 3y ago
  [flagged]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

wombat-man 3y ago

Well they just had to build out this completely ridiculous chat room feature and the sorta nice looking but slow redesign.

coffeebeqn 3y ago
And the.. avatars with micro transactions and possibly some NFT nonsense
- wombat-man 3y ago
  Yeah thank god the avatars are NFTs somehow.

highmastdon 3y ago

With this in mind there’s still a viable business for third party apps; build an app so good for mods that they want to pay for it to cover the API costs. I know, it’s the undesired solution for regular users, but the goal of Reddit is to move everyone who doesn’t pay to the main channels. I still agree Reddit is making a deck move by doing this. I’m still using Alien Blue and even though there’s been no updates it still works, and will probably break when the new API structure lands, of which I’m really sad. I will probably not be using Reddit at all anymore as this is the only entry I’ve had for the past decade.