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> Who do you think the existing mods are? I am. I moderate my local city subreddit. All I do is remove surveys and point people seeking housing to the megathre

by RWSen 3y ago

> Who do you think the existing mods are? I am. I moderate my local city subreddit. All I do is remove surveys and point people seeking housing to the megathread. (We're a university town, so lots of students seek people willing to fill in badly designed questionaires.) Yes, the biggest subreddits will always have a number of power tripping mods. But the vast majority of subreddits have a stable mod team putting in a little daily effort to keep their online community organised. These are the people who will walk away if the removal of their preferred tools makes moderating harder. At least I know I will.

jtode 3y ago
I keep seeing this ubercynical take that "mods are all on a power trip" from people who are clearly planning to invest in the IPO. Normally this forum has a lot of nuanced thought but on this one I'm seeing a lot of VC groupthink happening. No matter how you try to fashion your logic, Reddit was a community effort, done in good faith by many volunteers, and it really was the last of the platforms with any sort of legitimacy because of that, and that is now gone for good. Do people learn the lesson about trusting capital? We'll see.
- themoonisachees 3y ago
  To be entirely fair, it was already common on reddit to accuse mods of being on power trips. /U/awkwardtheturtle and other powermods have been a known issue for a while (see also: the /r/GME moderator kerfuffle). I agree that most moderator work was airline quality (few incidents but "televized" heavily for its failures), but most incidents get you going "well why was anyone allowed this kind of unchecked power in the first place?". I think people blaming moderators for this don't get that this is people losing what is ultimately their hobby and not some kind of powertrip by 2k+ people all at the same time.
- codetrotter 3y ago
  > I keep seeing this ubercynical take that "mods are all on a power trip" from people who are clearly planning to invest in the IPO I think most of the people who are negative about Reddit mods are not because of any IPO. My theory is that a significant amount of the people who are very negative of Reddit mods are people who have had negative experiences with mods from Reddit or mods in other communities, and who are generalising their experiences to apply to all mods.
  - jtode 3y ago
    I do agree with you, though if any of them are reading this, I have to also validate their experience, if not their conclusions; I was shadowbanned in r/Winnipeg, my hometown and nearest city, and not because I'm an alt-right troll, I just have a somewhat argumentative tone about things I care deeply about - it came down to my tone. I know this because the sub is absolutely run, without acknowledgement, as a left-wing, anti-Tory space. As it happens, I am a left-wing, anti-Tory person who despises the people I am currently validating, so my opinions would never have run up against the mods' echo chamber policy. I definitely said and posted a few things which were highly opinionated, though, and which I don't particularly disavow, and which might have been less than constructive in how I said it. I'm pretty sure the post had to do with me talking about flipping the bird at someone who wasn't wearing a mask. It's not an anti-mask space. In the spirit of disclosure, and because this is starting to feel like a postmortem of the site, and so you have an idea what I was shadowbanned for, here is an example of my worst Reddit behavior (I'm the same on here as I was on there basically): after I rumbled the shadowban and left r/Winnipeg, I briefly went over to r/Manitoba, which promotes itself as the "free speech alternative" to r/Winnipeg, and it does indeed have some more conservative voices in the mix, and that's fine. That said, our current provincial gov is Tory and hostile to public service, so our roads and everything else have been steadily deteriorating everywhere. This government is highly bolstered by our local Mennonite Bible Belt, which is more or less everything South of Winnipeg. Anyways, there was flooding last spring and the roads were not fixed in a timely fashion. The only paved road to my town washed out last spring, and they JUST got started a couple months ago replacing it. So anyways, someone posted a newspaper article about the residents of one of these Tory-voting strongholds being out protesting the state of the highways. I was momentarily incensed at the gall of these people who created the situation and were now howling about not being able to drive their F350s to the Tim Horton's for some tasty Private Equity sludge, and so I said something along the lines of "Enjoy the world you voted for, hicks!" For my use of "hicks" in the "free speech alternative forum" I was not shadowbanned this time, but rather, the mods apparently kicked it up the ladder and I got a three-day ban for "promoting hate". I deleted my account about two minutes after getting the notification, and that was it for me and Reddit, about a year ago. In the case of the actual three-day ban I can't really argue with it, it's a technicality as far as I'm concerned, and selectively applied, but that's neither here nor there, I said the word, I earned the wrist slap. But that was basically the period on a sentence that I had been writing ever since realizing the shadowban was in place. If r/Winnipeg had given me a straight three-day ban and warned me about my tone, I would have accepted the rebuke actually. But shadowbans are sneaky and malicious, in my opinion, and there is no scenario where they are not; if you have a problem with someone, you say it to their face. If you kick someone out, you call the bouncer or you do it yourself, you don't send a robot to waste potentially years of their mental energy. That's being a shit human. I don't sit and stew about the mods who did these things, but I also won't participate in a site that allows it. That's the other reason I'm holding off on joining Lemmy for now, I would like to see if any sites take a stance on having no shadowbans. I can accept a ban quite happily, it just means this is not one of the places for me. I cannot accept misdirection of my energy and time, even once.
- jml78 3y ago
  Exactly, I don’t think people would remotely feel the same if Wikipedia did something to alienate all the experienced moderators in such a way a mass exodus occurred. Wikipedia would go to shit as inexperienced mods took over Yes there will be inexperienced people willing to step up as mod in the short term because they probably have zero clue what it entails. It will go poorly and the subreddits will be overrun by shit.
  - capr 3y ago
    Wikipedia went to shit long time ago. I only trust it with plants and animals.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  > Normally this forum has a lot of nuanced thought but on this one I'm seeing a lot of VC groupthink happening. This usually translates into: "I thought HN was great as long as I agreed with the general sentiment, but now that we disagree the VC groupthink is too much for me". If you thought HN normally does a lot of nuanced thought then maybe that's still the case today and it's you that lost the nuance.
  - jtode 3y ago
    Maybe you need to read my statement more closely, specifically the words "on this one". I said in a comment to someone else a few days ago, I had no idea who ran this forum until about a week or two ago - I could see that there were a lot of people who spend their lives in tech, but I did not know any actual names in the VC space or the reason for the forum's existence. I could also see that there were a lot of people who I don't agree with, but that for the most part, everyone stays civil. Make no mistake, this place is a marvel. There are factions here which I disagree with at an extremely fundamental level, but the worst that happens to me is I occasionally get some downvotes if I cuss. I got like twenty more fake internet points this morning. This place is great, period. That said, there are a lot of folks who hang out here that look to me like they are terminally infected with The Mindset.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      I know a fair number of HN participants in person, and a much larger number online but out-of-band. As a rule they're pretty knowledgeable within their field, and nice people in line with their HN persona. I've seen all kinds of beautiful stuff here, projects that get off the ground friendships, altruism and extreme effort to clarify things sometimes in the face of unreasonable assumptions and worse. HN really is special. But it is also very fragile and the degree to which this is the case is probably not much appreciated. It would be good if people realized that HN can't go the way of Reddit because it doesn't have a financial goal other than to attract the best in the industry to generate the next batch of founders. But if HN were a profit motivated institution, if it had to compete for funding and if it had to do ad sales, broaden the offering and maintain a thousand and one relationships with other businesses I have absolutely no doubt the character would be destroyed before the week is out and you'd have another Reddit on your hand the week after. Doing this as a niche site is relatively easy and relatively efficient on a manpower level. To operate the #18 website in the world (which is where Reddit is) whilst everybody is second guessing your every move isn't easy. I've ran a large forum myself (1M+ users) and it was always a balancing act, groups of users that hate each other, power trips by individuals who believe the site is about them and so on. I've seen all of that and then some, so I don't envy the people running Reddit.
- bnralt 3y ago
  I highly doubt any of the comments here are from people who want to invest in the IPO and think badmouthing mods will help them. Honestly, most of the dislike for the way that mods run Reddit is from simply running into the types of things mods on Reddit do. A few examples off the top of my head: - The current blackout, where for most subs (all the subs I've visited, and every one I've checked), the decision to shut down the subs was made completely by the mods and not the users. - /r/boardgaming had a bunch of mods that wanted to go into users history and ban them from /r/boardgaming if they didn't like their politics. The head mod objected, the other mods went on strike, then the head mod relented and let them do what they wanted. - Recently saw a post on /r/centrist where half the posts where a mod disagreeing with people, and when the mod got downvoted they stickied a "you all are wrong and this is why we can't have good things" comment and then removed the whole thread. - City subs banned any discussion of crime for a while, even when polls showed it the top concern for residents in a city. - Mods of a large sub saying that users need to spend more time outside, so only mods would be allowed to make submissions over the summer. - The whole drama with /r/workreform, where it was just created by a normal user after /r/antiwork fell apart. When it suddenly got huge, the user who created it was pushed out and it was taken over by powermods. - /r/startrek mods banned people who didn't like new Star Trek show, then when those people started their own sub at /r/star_trek, they had the admins threaten to shut down the new sub if any user many any mention of the old sub (despite there being subs like /r/subredditdrama devoted to trashing other subs). Then they later got the entire sub shutdown for spurious reasons. I could go on, but it's worth pointing out that the latter two are about how powerful mods work in conjunction with admins (many of who were previous mods) to shape things the platform the way they want. This is honestly a much bigger problem for the average use than the API stuff, since dissenting opinion is often hunted down and banned, and any somewhat large community gets pushed to be under the thumb of a small group of (frankly, rather unhinged) individuals.
  - jtode 3y ago
    Suffice to say, there's a lot to unpack in there, and I have a long list of yard tasks to get done. A lot of what you're describing is gonna happen everywhere, it happened on usenet, it happened in web forums, it has always happened. Now I come from a different viewpoint than you, and I have had a certain kind of view about what you're discussing here as it relates to the internet since way before Reddit existed. One historical example for me was the Seymour Duncan (guitar pickup company) web forum. In theory, electric-guitar focused and the official rules said no politics. That said, it was a nest of late 90s internet right wingers, including the legendary Lord Valve, who you can look up and watch an interview where he's wearing a confederate hat, so. I spoke up once or twice and got told no politics, while others were ranting about commies. So might suggest that if you see this is a reddit-specific issue, that might indicate that you have been living in a different sort of bubble.
- kodah 3y ago
  There's a good number of Reddit mods that also run IRC chatrooms. There's a venn diagram there and it doesn't have an IPO slice.
- rchaud 3y ago
  > from people who are clearly planning to invest in the IPO. It's not that, it's about siding with power and revelling in watching the uppity peasants get their due. I saw the same thing on HN during the Twitter and other tech company layoffs. Little sympathy for the workers, but lots of HR quarterbacking about "bullshit jobs".
yonaguska 3y ago
You are the exception, not the rule. Overzealous or corporate owned reddit mods already killed the site for a lot of people. I feel bad for the mods of smaller communities, but I have no sympathy for most. I'm glad that people like you are walking away, you can make some other part of the internet a better place, or better yet, you can now devote your efforts to making some real place better.

by RWSen 3y ago

jtode 3y ago

I keep seeing this ubercynical take that "mods are all on a power trip" from people who are clearly planning to invest in the IPO. Normally this forum has a lot of nuanced thought but on this one I'm seeing a lot of VC groupthink happening. No matter how you try to fashion your logic, Reddit was a community effort, done in good faith by many volunteers, and it really was the last of the platforms with any sort of legitimacy because of that, and that is now gone for good. Do people learn the lesson about trusting capital? We'll see.

themoonisachees 3y ago
To be entirely fair, it was already common on reddit to accuse mods of being on power trips. /U/awkwardtheturtle and other powermods have been a known issue for a while (see also: the /r/GME moderator kerfuffle). I agree that most moderator work was airline quality (few incidents but "televized" heavily for its failures), but most incidents get you going "well why was anyone allowed this kind of unchecked power in the first place?". I think people blaming moderators for this don't get that this is people losing what is ultimately their hobby and not some kind of powertrip by 2k+ people all at the same time.
codetrotter 3y ago
> I keep seeing this ubercynical take that "mods are all on a power trip" from people who are clearly planning to invest in the IPO I think most of the people who are negative about Reddit mods are not because of any IPO. My theory is that a significant amount of the people who are very negative of Reddit mods are people who have had negative experiences with mods from Reddit or mods in other communities, and who are generalising their experiences to apply to all mods.
- jtode 3y ago
  I do agree with you, though if any of them are reading this, I have to also validate their experience, if not their conclusions; I was shadowbanned in r/Winnipeg, my hometown and nearest city, and not because I'm an alt-right troll, I just have a somewhat argumentative tone about things I care deeply about - it came down to my tone. I know this because the sub is absolutely run, without acknowledgement, as a left-wing, anti-Tory space. As it happens, I am a left-wing, anti-Tory person who despises the people I am currently validating, so my opinions would never have run up against the mods' echo chamber policy. I definitely said and posted a few things which were highly opinionated, though, and which I don't particularly disavow, and which might have been less than constructive in how I said it. I'm pretty sure the post had to do with me talking about flipping the bird at someone who wasn't wearing a mask. It's not an anti-mask space. In the spirit of disclosure, and because this is starting to feel like a postmortem of the site, and so you have an idea what I was shadowbanned for, here is an example of my worst Reddit behavior (I'm the same on here as I was on there basically): after I rumbled the shadowban and left r/Winnipeg, I briefly went over to r/Manitoba, which promotes itself as the "free speech alternative" to r/Winnipeg, and it does indeed have some more conservative voices in the mix, and that's fine. That said, our current provincial gov is Tory and hostile to public service, so our roads and everything else have been steadily deteriorating everywhere. This government is highly bolstered by our local Mennonite Bible Belt, which is more or less everything South of Winnipeg. Anyways, there was flooding last spring and the roads were not fixed in a timely fashion. The only paved road to my town washed out last spring, and they JUST got started a couple months ago replacing it. So anyways, someone posted a newspaper article about the residents of one of these Tory-voting strongholds being out protesting the state of the highways. I was momentarily incensed at the gall of these people who created the situation and were now howling about not being able to drive their F350s to the Tim Horton's for some tasty Private Equity sludge, and so I said something along the lines of "Enjoy the world you voted for, hicks!" For my use of "hicks" in the "free speech alternative forum" I was not shadowbanned this time, but rather, the mods apparently kicked it up the ladder and I got a three-day ban for "promoting hate". I deleted my account about two minutes after getting the notification, and that was it for me and Reddit, about a year ago. In the case of the actual three-day ban I can't really argue with it, it's a technicality as far as I'm concerned, and selectively applied, but that's neither here nor there, I said the word, I earned the wrist slap. But that was basically the period on a sentence that I had been writing ever since realizing the shadowban was in place. If r/Winnipeg had given me a straight three-day ban and warned me about my tone, I would have accepted the rebuke actually. But shadowbans are sneaky and malicious, in my opinion, and there is no scenario where they are not; if you have a problem with someone, you say it to their face. If you kick someone out, you call the bouncer or you do it yourself, you don't send a robot to waste potentially years of their mental energy. That's being a shit human. I don't sit and stew about the mods who did these things, but I also won't participate in a site that allows it. That's the other reason I'm holding off on joining Lemmy for now, I would like to see if any sites take a stance on having no shadowbans. I can accept a ban quite happily, it just means this is not one of the places for me. I cannot accept misdirection of my energy and time, even once.
jml78 3y ago
Exactly, I don’t think people would remotely feel the same if Wikipedia did something to alienate all the experienced moderators in such a way a mass exodus occurred. Wikipedia would go to shit as inexperienced mods took over Yes there will be inexperienced people willing to step up as mod in the short term because they probably have zero clue what it entails. It will go poorly and the subreddits will be overrun by shit.
- capr 3y ago
  Wikipedia went to shit long time ago. I only trust it with plants and animals.
jacquesm 3y ago
> Normally this forum has a lot of nuanced thought but on this one I'm seeing a lot of VC groupthink happening. This usually translates into: "I thought HN was great as long as I agreed with the general sentiment, but now that we disagree the VC groupthink is too much for me". If you thought HN normally does a lot of nuanced thought then maybe that's still the case today and it's you that lost the nuance.
- jtode 3y ago
  Maybe you need to read my statement more closely, specifically the words "on this one". I said in a comment to someone else a few days ago, I had no idea who ran this forum until about a week or two ago - I could see that there were a lot of people who spend their lives in tech, but I did not know any actual names in the VC space or the reason for the forum's existence. I could also see that there were a lot of people who I don't agree with, but that for the most part, everyone stays civil. Make no mistake, this place is a marvel. There are factions here which I disagree with at an extremely fundamental level, but the worst that happens to me is I occasionally get some downvotes if I cuss. I got like twenty more fake internet points this morning. This place is great, period. That said, there are a lot of folks who hang out here that look to me like they are terminally infected with The Mindset.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    I know a fair number of HN participants in person, and a much larger number online but out-of-band. As a rule they're pretty knowledgeable within their field, and nice people in line with their HN persona. I've seen all kinds of beautiful stuff here, projects that get off the ground friendships, altruism and extreme effort to clarify things sometimes in the face of unreasonable assumptions and worse. HN really is special. But it is also very fragile and the degree to which this is the case is probably not much appreciated. It would be good if people realized that HN can't go the way of Reddit because it doesn't have a financial goal other than to attract the best in the industry to generate the next batch of founders. But if HN were a profit motivated institution, if it had to compete for funding and if it had to do ad sales, broaden the offering and maintain a thousand and one relationships with other businesses I have absolutely no doubt the character would be destroyed before the week is out and you'd have another Reddit on your hand the week after. Doing this as a niche site is relatively easy and relatively efficient on a manpower level. To operate the #18 website in the world (which is where Reddit is) whilst everybody is second guessing your every move isn't easy. I've ran a large forum myself (1M+ users) and it was always a balancing act, groups of users that hate each other, power trips by individuals who believe the site is about them and so on. I've seen all of that and then some, so I don't envy the people running Reddit.
bnralt 3y ago
I highly doubt any of the comments here are from people who want to invest in the IPO and think badmouthing mods will help them. Honestly, most of the dislike for the way that mods run Reddit is from simply running into the types of things mods on Reddit do. A few examples off the top of my head: - The current blackout, where for most subs (all the subs I've visited, and every one I've checked), the decision to shut down the subs was made completely by the mods and not the users. - /r/boardgaming had a bunch of mods that wanted to go into users history and ban them from /r/boardgaming if they didn't like their politics. The head mod objected, the other mods went on strike, then the head mod relented and let them do what they wanted. - Recently saw a post on /r/centrist where half the posts where a mod disagreeing with people, and when the mod got downvoted they stickied a "you all are wrong and this is why we can't have good things" comment and then removed the whole thread. - City subs banned any discussion of crime for a while, even when polls showed it the top concern for residents in a city. - Mods of a large sub saying that users need to spend more time outside, so only mods would be allowed to make submissions over the summer. - The whole drama with /r/workreform, where it was just created by a normal user after /r/antiwork fell apart. When it suddenly got huge, the user who created it was pushed out and it was taken over by powermods. - /r/startrek mods banned people who didn't like new Star Trek show, then when those people started their own sub at /r/star_trek, they had the admins threaten to shut down the new sub if any user many any mention of the old sub (despite there being subs like /r/subredditdrama devoted to trashing other subs). Then they later got the entire sub shutdown for spurious reasons. I could go on, but it's worth pointing out that the latter two are about how powerful mods work in conjunction with admins (many of who were previous mods) to shape things the platform the way they want. This is honestly a much bigger problem for the average use than the API stuff, since dissenting opinion is often hunted down and banned, and any somewhat large community gets pushed to be under the thumb of a small group of (frankly, rather unhinged) individuals.
- jtode 3y ago
  Suffice to say, there's a lot to unpack in there, and I have a long list of yard tasks to get done. A lot of what you're describing is gonna happen everywhere, it happened on usenet, it happened in web forums, it has always happened. Now I come from a different viewpoint than you, and I have had a certain kind of view about what you're discussing here as it relates to the internet since way before Reddit existed. One historical example for me was the Seymour Duncan (guitar pickup company) web forum. In theory, electric-guitar focused and the official rules said no politics. That said, it was a nest of late 90s internet right wingers, including the legendary Lord Valve, who you can look up and watch an interview where he's wearing a confederate hat, so. I spoke up once or twice and got told no politics, while others were ranting about commies. So might suggest that if you see this is a reddit-specific issue, that might indicate that you have been living in a different sort of bubble.
kodah 3y ago
There's a good number of Reddit mods that also run IRC chatrooms. There's a venn diagram there and it doesn't have an IPO slice.
rchaud 3y ago
> from people who are clearly planning to invest in the IPO. It's not that, it's about siding with power and revelling in watching the uppity peasants get their due. I saw the same thing on HN during the Twitter and other tech company layoffs. Little sympathy for the workers, but lots of HR quarterbacking about "bullshit jobs".

yonaguska 3y ago

You are the exception, not the rule. Overzealous or corporate owned reddit mods already killed the site for a lot of people. I feel bad for the mods of smaller communities, but I have no sympathy for most. I'm glad that people like you are walking away, you can make some other part of the internet a better place, or better yet, you can now devote your efforts to making some real place better.