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The mistake is that reddit thinks moderators use the API for convenience and not by necessity. Previous protests against reddit didn't last long, because they w
by themoonisachees 3y ago
The mistake is that reddit thinks moderators use the API for convenience and not by necessity. Previous protests against reddit didn't last long, because they were against things that fundamentally didn't matter outside of ethics, while this is, especially for moderators, a significant ask for their already unpaid labor. Moderators, emboldened by user support, are on strike because this affects them personally in a big way. The interpersonal bullshit spez in particular has been pulling was just the nail in the coffin for users who weren't quite sure who to support.
- xaqfox 3y agoI am one of those users who doesn't quite know who to support. I absolutely support the end users generating and consuming the content. There are seemingly regular examples of both, admin and mods abusing these users. What kind of mod tools do the apps allow that Reddit does not? I do not know if these are mod tools I would agree are necessary (e.g. bans for repeated spam) or are these tools that I would agree allow mods to abuse their power (e.g. ban users are who mere followers of other subreddits). Frankly, I fear unofficial mod tools could lead to much worse problems if at least portions of the API are not carefully rate limited. Here I include pricing as a type of rate limiting and this could be Reddit's attempt at reeling in this abuse (even if only for IPO reasons). A particular egregious example of such an abuse would be to download all new users' history of posts to make a race determination and ban a new user because of that. Sure, a mod could do this manually using Reddit's UI, but it would remain more difficult to automate this on a large-scale.