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Reddit CEO Says Mods Too Powerful, Plans to Weaken After Blackout

290 points by ryan_j_naughton 3y ago

diogenescynic 3y ago
Good riddance. The moderators are the worst part of Reddit. Just pay someone to do their job.
- dralley 3y ago
  If reddit isn't profitable now, they're certainly not going to be profitable without thousands of hours of unpaid labor being done for them.
- hawk_ 3y ago
  :-) Good luck finding a qualified paid army of mods doing this at reddit scale. Even if they manage to find, do they have the money?
  - vezycash 3y ago
    Easy - go the google, make a deal with open ai for a mod bot that's just good enough.
  - mardifoufs 3y ago
    Qualified? Is this a joke? Most of them are absolute losers. Almost every single powermod that is open about their real life identity turns out to fit exactly into the "usual suspect" mold (middle aged, usually white, usually nerdy and terminally online). There are screenshots of mods that moderate the most on Reddit begging and crying to not lose their moderator position. Here's a direct quote from one of the most powerful mod on Reddit on hearing they lost mod powers on a single sub: "I have no job, I dont meet people, have no money.I only have reddit. Please dont take reddit from me" Sure sound like a qualified, well adjusted moderating staff overall.
- g4d 3y ago
  I mean, they're better than branded subs being moderated by the brand. Imagine Disney just being given the ability to moderate all of the starwars or marvel subs.
- jmclnx 3y ago
  >The moderators are the worst part of Reddit. probably why you were down voted, I think the mods provide a decent service preventing it from degenerating into an echo chamber like truth-social >Just pay someone to do their job This I agree with, if the mods were paid well, maybe things would be better. Maybe a rule change like "If your group gets xxx many unique users posting content per day, you get paid X". But that can be abused too.
  - prepend 3y ago
    > preventing it from degenerating into an echo chamber like truth-social I can’t compare to truth-social as Ive never used it. But big subs like /r/politics are definitely echo chambers and I think they are that way because the mods like it that way.
    - dotnet00 3y ago
      It's even less likely that paid mods would change that though, they'd only make it worse because they'd only want to stick to a very narrow set of "safe" advertiser friendly opinions, just like most other social media.
      - prepend 3y ago
        Definitely. I think communities are more effective when the “elders” volunteer out of love to run. I don’t think you can pay people enough to make up for passion. This is based on experiences with community centers, game meetups, marathon planners, and dev communities. You usually have to have someone on the payroll, but having a high ratio of volunteers usually means higher quality community. My most clear example is the difference between hiking meetups that are just some people planning stuff vs the ones planned by REI. The REI ones are pretty fun, but the meetups are more thought out and better, I think.
  - BlargMcLarg 3y ago
    >preventing it from degenerating into an echo chamber Reddit mods are notorious for creating echo chambers through 3rd party mod tools. You know, those tools autobanning about any account who happens to post on a sub they consider no-no, often regardless the context. If those tools weren't on the line, they wouldn't care to join the blackout.
- asow92 3y ago
  Agreed. Just my opinion: most mods I've encountered seem like smarmy, smug, and sanctimonious petty tyrants who need to touch grass.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    Paradoxically the only places I’ve seen this “touch grass” sentiment used are full of people who… need to touch grass.
    - asow92 3y ago
      I've got about 2 acres of it if you wanna let them know. We can have a BBQ. Everybody's welcome.
  - cheekibreeki2 3y ago
    Reminds me of r/philadelphia which was one point was modded by Europeans who didn't understand the city's roots.
- pnemonic 3y ago
  What a terrible, toxic capitalist take.
- piva00 3y ago
  A lot of well run subs would never exist in the first place without good mods. A very good example of that is /r/askhistorians, without a heavy enforcement of their guidelines the quality of that sub would be absolute trash. There are definitely a lot of bad mods, even more in popular subs, and even more in popular subs that are not centered around a community of hobbyist and/or fans. The value of reddit is not this trash though, it's the subs that are well moderated and curated to avoid the spamming, low effort/low quality content and so on. Because the torrent of low quality meme-like content can be found in any number of platforms: 9gag, imgur, etc. but very few places have a /r/askhistorians or a 30k active users community for a niche hobby.
  - samstave 3y ago
    /u/mrgrimm founder of IMGUR should be charging Reddit for their API/'infra' (as spez was on NPR saying they pay "10s of millions per year for infra" to support third party apps - but they are "still talking to several apps"... IMGUR should pull a protest and charge reddit (although I assume they are already deep in bed together... you can type in any /r/ into IMGR.com/r/pics for example and get all the pics posted to /r/pics -- or any other sub.... The point being that IMGUR should be charging reddit for all the "infra" costs their traffic has on their "infra" -- EDIT : Can I sell my reddit accounts to some EU citizen for $1 (eu) such that you then own my account and can use GDPR laws to demand reddit delete my account/comments/history? (I have 17 years worth of comments on there) GDP-[REDDIT-COMMENT-DELETION-AS-A-SERVICE] GPT-GDPRCDAAS --- EDIT2 : /u/spez was again on NPR, where NPR stated that still "50% of the largest subs are still in protest" -- and then Spez stated that the business hasn't been impacted. So riddle me thus ;; If you can shutter 50% of your top subreddits without "significant impact to the business" , then how can you claim that you're paying "10s of millions" to "support" 3rd party API call apps, in 'infra' -- and this is 'unsustainable' yet killing '50% of top subs' has no impact on the business? /u/spez might want to consider subscribing to /r/theyDidTheMath EDIT3 : "https://gizmodo.com/subreddits-retreat-api-war-as-ceo-steve-huffman-demands-1850546883 https://gizmodo.com/subreddits-retreat-api-war-as-ceo-steve-... Has Reddit paid mods for un-blocking? Has Reddit paid ANY MODS EVER? Shouldnt this be in an SEC filing, if they are hedging for an IPO payout so /u/spez can go off into the tech sunset? Shouldnt Reddit be required to report which mods they paid off in the past? Should reddit be required to announce which MOD accounts are held as alts by actual employees (admins) of reddit?
- dotnet00 3y ago
  In addition to the issues everyone else has pointed out, unpaid volunteer mods give Reddit a lot of deniability. If they switched to paid mods, they'd become much more strict on what content and opinions they allow, because to advertisers, things would switch from "reddit allows communities to moderate themselves and can't be expected to catch everything we don't like", where reddit can still get away with some amount of unfriendly content as long as it doesn't get too prominent, to "it's reddit's job to make sure that all content is advertiser friendly". Similarly, if you have paid mods, what does that mean for subreddits which have the same topic, but were split over moderation disagreements? With volunteer mods that doesn't really matter to reddit, but if the mods cost reddit money, they'll want subs on the same topic to be consolidated, creating further friction and destroying communities.
- berkle4455 3y ago
  I like how you think Reddit has the spare capital to hire mods. VCs are running for the door (that’s why it’s an IPO) and index fund retail investors will be left holding the bag.
damnesian 3y ago
[flagged]
sdflhasjd 3y ago
I take it users will be able to vote out Admins and the CEO as well?
- bpodgursky 3y ago
  Why should the users have any vote over anything?
  - jjkaczor 3y ago
    It's their content. Reddit wouldn't exist without user contributed, moderated and 'engaged' content.
    - dathinab 3y ago
      especially not without moderation without the ton of unpayed moderators they wouldn't be able to comply with hate speech laws (or comply by having moderation systems which are "out of context of the conversation" enough to drive a lot of users away) without it all the good content would be drowned by spam and other bad stuff in turn without moderators the most users would leave sooner or later
  - andrewstuart2 3y ago
    Well, for one, they're the sole value prop for the site. They generate, rank, and curate the content in concert with mods and admins.
    - have_faith 3y ago
      Why don't the users go and do that somewhere else? genuine question, I don't use Reddit.
      - andrewstuart2 3y ago
        I think that's the emerging plan, yes.
      - 3y ago
AnotherGoodName 3y ago
Ha. There were some weird posts from new users in subreddits I frequent. 'we need to rise up against the mods the blackout is an outrage!' It was met with unanimous wtf is wrong with you, go outside. I get the feeling spez is creating new accounts and posting as them again.
- aaomidi 3y ago
  They can easily use shit like ChatGPT to astroturf tbh.
  - conradfr 3y ago
    I can't find it but there was a screenshot the other day of a pro-reddit post which started with "I'm sorry, but I cannot fulfill that request."
    - aaomidi 3y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36361247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36361247
- sarasasa28 3y ago
  Well, I, for one, don't fucking care about third party apps (which make money mind you) Reddit is/was my first source of real human information for a lot of stuff (since google is unusable now). And this blackout was really a pain in the ass
  - agentgumshoe 3y ago
    And just like a good old protest, it got it's point across with legal disruption. At least you're aware of the issues now, no?
  - Y-bar 3y ago
    I do care about the third party apps because they assist moderators in doing their job (which has been done for free as a service to Reddit). And more personally, they provide accessibility support lacking both in the Reddit website and app. I am not a mod, and will literally no longer be able to use Reddit as well as I have had over the last years. The third-party developers have provided Reddit with tremendous value which is now lost.
smrtinsert 3y ago
There goes reddit. No one wants an unmoderated slop.
- cm2012 3y ago
  There will be plenty of people willing to be moderators, don't worry.
- prepend 3y ago
  I wouldn’t mind it. I moderate some smallish subs (5-10k users) and don’t really make many mod actions. Maybe 5 in the past 15 years. The subs are still pretty good as measured by increasing subscriber counts and my own enjoyment. I think the huge subs probably get a bunch of spam, but then I ignore them even with moderation.
  - andrewmunsell 3y ago
    It's more than a spam problem, though: you only have to look as far as Twitter to see that lax moderation that allows toxic or illegal content to exist-- even on a small part of the site-- can begin to drive away advertisers across the whole site, which could turn into a death spiral for Reddit.
    - arbitrage 3y ago
      Oh no, won't someone think of the advertisers!?
    - prepend 3y ago
      I don’t care about that problem. The cost of running something like Reddit is so cheap. I’ve run bbs servers and it’s not free, but it’s really cheap. Reddit is just text if you stop hosting images and video. It was profitable 10 years ago. It just want “unicorn” “profitable” for a huge VC investment and IPO. I don’t care about that. Again, I’ve literally run subs for over a decade and haven’t seen this problem. Thousands of happy people are chugging along. No “toxic” material so far. I think the key ingredient may be some niche topic that doesn’t attract random people but some organizing interest.
lawn 3y ago
Translation: Reddit will take a heavier hand and stamp out any behavior they don't like. And the obvious next step is to sell control of subreddits to the highest bidder.
- BashiBazouk 3y ago
  Well, according to: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/reddit-ceo-slams-protest-leaders-says-hell-change-rules-that-could-end-rebellion/ar-AA1cBP7f https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/reddit-ceo-slams-pro... "Huffman said, though, that he’d like to see some form of revenue-sharing. “I would like subreddits to be able to be businesses if they choose,” he said, adding that’s “another conversation, but I think that’s the next frontier of Reddit.” You may not be far off...
zzzeek 3y ago
can we just have this thing become another Digg and go away already? this is so tedious
- prepend 3y ago
  I hope Digg is planning a DiggV5 for the reverse migration. It would be pretty funny if Kevin Rose bought Digg back and turned it into something not sucky that let’s people post links and comment on them. This could finally be his chance to make the twitter clone he always wanted.
  - Sylamore 3y ago
    I was actually surprised to find that digg.com is still around, even though it mostly seems to be a reddit repost site in it's current iteration.
    - prepend 3y ago
      Yeah, I think they sold out to some private equity firm that tore it down, but I guess finds it profitable to repost stuff. I think it sold for $30M so I’m sure the current owners would give it up for pretty cheap. I wonder who uses it. Maybe it’s just a google seo farm or something (although I’ve never seen it in my results).
lagniappe 3y ago
Part of me knows that there are scores of users waiting for their 'turn' to be moderators if the current ones are voted out. I don't think the current moderators see/acknowledge this.
- brainwave92 3y ago
  Yeah exactly this
- dathinab 3y ago
  also most of them would at least one of 1. not stay moderators a long time, while a lot of people want to be mods most severely underestimate how time intensive it can be 2. want to be mods to abuse the power 3. would be quite bad at the job 4. would continue the protests sooner or later, because they do agree with the current mods on this point (but not other points so they take advantage of it) All of which would drive users and high quality content away long term. Not saying that there hasn't always been a lot of drama and power struggles around mods in reddit and that there aren't already bad mods and that this would be true for all new mods. Still in my experience while there are always scores of users who want to be mods you really don't want to give mod powers to the huge majority of them and doing so is a grate way to destroy your community.
- flutas 3y ago
  I think they know it. I think what they are betting on is those new mods will be completely inept compared to experienced ones and it will lead to the site becoming worse overall.
pier25 3y ago
Reddit wouldn't be what it is without mods. Good luck finding people that will work for free without a sense of ownership.
- checker659 3y ago
  I've been on reddit for the majority of its life. Mods are dime a dozen.
  - darknavi 3y ago
    It really depends on the sub. Some subs have a lot of very specific rules and higher quality bar and then some are just a shit show of sub-specific content. Any community that operates with strict structure is done with dedicated mods and bots (which the mods manage).
  - pier25 3y ago
    Maybe for some subs but not the good ones like r/AskHistorians
- bdw5204 3y ago
  There's an endless supply of people who want to moderate forums and are happy to do so for free even if they don't get to set the rules or operate as a dictator. The moderators who consider the lack of "a sense of ownership" a deal breaker are precisely the people you don't want as moderators. They're the ones who are likely interested in that power for the sake of abusing it to serve their own personal agenda rather than the good of the community. It's no different from why we don't want cops to be able to make their own laws (and why laws that are vague enough to give them discretion to act capriciously are bad laws).
  - pier25 3y ago
    The problem is not the supply of mods, it's the commitment. Lots of people imagine they want to be mods but very few people really want to do the work.
- 3y ago
juujian 3y ago
Welcome to do all the moderating yourself Huffman. It's the task that all other social networks are constantly struggling with and coming up against laws and regulations, while Reddit had it somewhat figured out, or at least had some systems in place that are better than automated blanked removal. Way to shoot yourself in the foot.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > Welcome to do all the moderating yourself Huffman This is obviously the endgame. I don’t even think it would be that expensive.
  - km3r 3y ago
    There are significantly more mods than reddit employees. Reddits already struggling to be profitable and you think they can afford to pay moderators?
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > significantly more mods than reddit employees. Reddits already struggling to be profitable and you think they can afford to pay moderators? They're going to sacrifice quality. In the short run, that will work. The smart move would be to moderate with a small, expensive lead and cheaper offshore, arund-the-world talent. (The brilliant move would be to negotiate, but Huffman has made this personal.) Keep in mind the power law nature of content. What makes Reddit charming is the long tail. What makes it profitable, in the short term, is the short end. They don't need to hire mods for every subreddit, just the large ones, and among those, only those rebelling and unwilling to relent.
  - rootusrootus 3y ago
    > I don’t even think it would be that expensive. Agreed. I'll eat my hat if there aren't a few Reddit engineers working to leverage LLMs to make auto-moderation way more effective. I don't know how soon they'll get to the point of not needing any volunteer moderators, but I won't be surprised if within a year or so they have only professional supervisors for all the popular subreddits.
khalilravanna 3y ago
Quote from him in the NBC interview: “…a business owner can be fired by its shareholders…” You know, I think he may be on to something there. Maybe someone should look into that for oh, say, the CEO of Reddit.
- pizzalife 3y ago
  He doesn't seem to have a great way with words. If you are the owner (implying >50% ownership), you can't be fired by the shareholders. If you hold less than 50%, you are not the business owner.
  - antman 3y ago
    If you have more than 50% and your actions are deemed to be against the company the minority stakeholders can ask legally to take control. Even if no actions are taken but your statements appear incoherent
    - Onavo 3y ago
      Minority owners can sue, but it doesn't mean they will win. Especially in this case spez is most likely the lightning rod for the board so Reddit can get a big fat IPO. If majority of the board is behind him, there's nothing minority owners can do except pray. Investors are happy to preach and virtue signal about the 'S' in ESG until hundreds of millions is on the line. Then you won't hear a peep from them.
  - Retric 3y ago
    Under a few specific conditions minority shareholders can oust an owner CEO. Beyond board seats and voting rights, there is a duty to protect the interests of all shareholders not just the owner. So for example if the owner sells off assets to themselves below market rate it’s not ok. Similarly, if the owner CEO is in a coma, mental institution, etc they can be ousted.
  - LordKeren 3y ago
    If Huffman had the foresight to not speak, this whole mess probably would have blown over by now. The API change upset mods. The AMA and these subsequent interviews have created genuine animosity that will bring large changes to Reddit. If the outcome will be good or bad is anyone’s guess. But it’s clear that many moderators are much more upset at Huffman’s behavior than the API changes.
ac130kz 3y ago
Let's just migrate to lemmy, reddit is EOL
- Adiqq 3y ago
  I agree, lemmy still has a lot of rough edges, but it would be better to depend on decentralized infrastructure, where no CEO will decide rules. In case of Reddit it's just beginning. I don't really care about API access, but they send clear signal that they only care about profits, not about users and community. What's next? They will require paid subscription to browse content created by users for free, because traffic generates costs and they "have to be profitable"? Today they still have huge userbase and it's their only advantage. There was Digg, there is Reddit and soon there will be next thing like lemmy.
DueDilligence 3y ago
[dead]
toss1 3y ago
Seems like the right time for someone to start a new site with similar capabilities, and maybe based on lessons learned, different legal and monetary arrangements with the stakeholders. More like a co-op structure?
dathinab 3y ago
ah yes unpayed people which don't just invest a ton of time and have to use a ton of 3rd party tooling to even make it viable and much more often have to coop with the social backslash of "moderation mistakes" have too much power by .... privating a subredit which likely wouldn't exit without them during a time when they can't moderate(1) it ... except that that and making it read only is pretty much the only responsible thing they can do (1): due to protesting, also somewhat due to the API changes but that is more complex
agentgumshoe 3y ago
Mods do whatever they like: "things are fine" Mods hurt potential profits: "mods too powerful, need to act" If the community doesn't like the mods, they can... create a new subreddit with new mods.
- bogantech 3y ago
  > If the community doesn't like the mods, they can... create a new subreddit with new mods. If mods are going to permanently set subs private then they should be seized and given to someone who will use it
  - AnotherGoodName 3y ago
    Why not just create a new subreddit? Eg. /r/gaming became a meme ridden shitshow and someone made /r/games which bans memes and it's great. No need to seize anything. Let people go where they want.
    - lightbendover 3y ago
      Majority of users will not know about the new subreddit and simply be annoyed that the subreddit they visited for years is suddenly missing.
    - BuyMyBitcoins 3y ago
      The “just start your own [xyz]” rarely succeeds and isn’t a viable alternative.
  - km3r 3y ago
    The polls I've seen on subs after the reopened have been largely in favor of continuing the blackout. The community supports this, adding a more direct ability to remove mods is just going to be abused by brigading.
rco8786 3y ago
This guy is so tone deaf it's astonishing
bhaak 3y ago
Every day that passes I’m getting more convinced that the best move to improve the likelihood of a successful IPO (which IMHO this whole API clusterfuck is all about) is to fire spez and install a sane CEO. How can it be that he is still in charge and hasn’t been fired years ago?
- agentgumshoe 3y ago
  Because the talent pool more broadly is probably lacking quality, lol.
- cragfar 3y ago
  A sane CEO would instantly ban all the participating mods of the larger subreddits. And then pick off the rest that didn't get the message.
  - runesofdoom 3y ago
    And the same message would still be sent to every user who cares: whatever value you see here is worthless to us, the owners. You have no stake, and we value your experience only as a source of wealth extraction. A lot of users probably don't care. Others probably think that's a fine and proper thing. For myself, it's a reminder and a warning. The reminder is that Reddit is a Cthulhu-esque machine and cannot be trusted. Reddit and myself were always ships whose courses had happened to align, I have been warned that they are changing course to one I will not like. That's all fair enough, but far from admirable. But my takeaway is that the net value of Reddit, to me, is going to be negative for the forseeable future, so my own best course is to block it completely. Others can make their own choices.
- fullshark 3y ago
  Do you disagree with him here? Mods are too powerful, many have decided to try and murder the site because of something most users don't even care about. The idea that because I volunteered to moderate r/subcultureX for a few years I can make sure www.reddit.com/r/subcultureX can never direct to any content forever is ridiculous.
jarym 3y ago
> "What I'm suggesting as a pathway out is actually more democracy," If he wanted more democracy he would have listened more and sooner. He simply didn't like what he was hearing. But let's not confuse things - Reddit is a business that wants to IPO, democracy isn't what this is about by any measure. This mess keeps getting worse (for Reddit but also all the communities on it) and he clearly lacks the means to navigate his way out of it.
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
  Looks like they perfectly know what they are doing, and the plan is pretty clear to me, and they said it: "mods too powerful", to me this sounds like a government or a big company, they don't like when the people have too much power or when they unionize, so they turn authoritarian and totalitarian, Reddit is just like that, turning into something it shouldn't, I wouldn't be surprised if they were pressured by the CIA/NSA
- leoldo 3y ago
  [dead]
agentgumshoe 3y ago
Honestly, if mods can just be voted out by their community, it will be chaos and little noisy groups of people will ruin everything. I am thinking this is not so much a well thought out and reasoned opinion after weighing up historical behaviour on the platform, but a whiplash to a protest actually having effect. Just maybe...
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  It's pretty clear that /spez doesn't actually use reddit very much and doesn't really understand how it works "on the ground".
- PM_me_your_math 3y ago
  At least all those bot farms would have something else to do with their time.
fwef64 3y ago
I'm surprised that noone came up with a free (libre) alternative to reddit where each subreddit would be a deployable standalone server. Or is there a project like that that I'm unaware of?
- icebraining 3y ago
  There's Lemmy and Kbin.
OrvalWintermute 3y ago
I'm torn. There is a well-known cabal of reddit mods that control many of the most popular subreddits [1] and many of them act like the subs they mod are their personal fiefdoms. Some of them have been alleged to exploit their subs for financial gain, or personal karma gain [2] at the expense of regular users Some of these mods have operated in cahoots with Reddit Administration to squelch stories they didn't like [3], to push a political narrative, or to stop grass roots issues. While I recognize people should live harassment free, they need to operate with a great amount of editorial discretion to keep conversations on topic and apropos. [1] https://www.cracked.com/article_29675_the-secret-war-against-reddits-moderator-oligarchy.html https://www.cracked.com/article_29675_the-secret-war-against... [2] https://www.protocol.com/reddit-powermods-war https://www.protocol.com/reddit-powermods-war [3] https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/927/965/6c2.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/927/965/6c2...
- aluminussoma 3y ago
  Here is why I find it hard to believe there is a cabal of mods: what is their motivation for shutting down Reddit? If this is true, these fiefdom mods are hurting themselves financially and personally by keeping their subreddits shut down. The simplest explanation to me is that they protest because they care. It is not just Apollo. They don't like the overall direction Reddit is heading in.
  - OrvalWintermute 3y ago
    > Here is why I find it hard to believe there is a cabal of mods: Reddit mods doing things like this is well known [1] [2] What is really strange is how the mods will tend to infiltrate a subreddit, get mod rights, and then bring over a bunch of other mods that are already cross-modding important subs across Reddit. This has led to weird situations where a few mods control much of Reddit's top subreddits [3] [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/modabuse/ https://old.reddit.com/r/modabuse/ [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/zk39a1/cmv_moderator_abuse_should_be_punished_more/ https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/zk39a1/cmv_mo... [3] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/reddit-92-of-the-top-500-moderators-list https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/reddit-92-of-the-top-5...
ofslidingfeet 3y ago
This has been an easily understood problem for years now. He tried to gaslight us about this problem for years, and now he's reaping what he sowed.
guardiangod 3y ago
The difference between Musk/Twitter and spez/Reddit is that the value of Reddit lies in its army of unpaid moderators, and Twitter's value lies in its brand recognition. When Musk took over and pissed off everyone, the only protest the users can do is to leave the platform. Some did but not enough to hurt Twitter. That's because the management (ie modding) is done by Twitter staff already. With a strong brand, Twitter survived. For reddit, the core value is the unpaid moderators. If those moderators leave, you now have a bunch of communities with no management. History shows any communities entering an anarchy (or worse sycophants assigned by Reddit) will not last long, or at least, will stop their organic growth and decline.
- BlargMcLarg 3y ago
  >If those moderators leave, Then they will find new ones. As long as Reddit has usecases, as long as the powertrip is worth the lack of ownership and poor tooling, there will be mods willing to moderate subs and feeling powerful and getting drunk off of it. 'Historically', this has happened in every social medium with moderation so far. There's no anarchy here. Most Redditors don't care for the mods in particular. If the underlying reason doesn't move them, a new generation of mods will take place and the cycle continues.
  - guardiangod 3y ago
    >Most Redditors don't care for the mods in particular. Because the current batch of moderation work well enough. Now imagine the current batch leave, and the new ones take over are worse (and they will be worse since Reddit has shown that Reddit has direct control over the Moderators' position safety, if the actions are not aligned with Reddit's CEO. Some reasonable people will not like that.) Eventually the remaining good ones will be replace again, and after a few generation, only the bad moderators are left. For example, just look at every dictatorship government in the world. No dictator starts out hiring only bad officials. Everyone's benevolent with good intention. Eventually, the good officials gradually get push out and sycophants fill the rank.
    - BlargMcLarg 3y ago
activiation 3y ago
Can we get a third party to handle votes? I have a feeling voting might be rigged otherwise.
sam0x17 3y ago
It's really going down hill I hope someone makes an actually viable alternative. There is no good place to have discussions on a variety of topics on the internet anymore.
devit 3y ago
Well, that's accurate and indeed a major problem. Subreddit moderators, like unfortunately usually moderators everywhere, can act arbitrarily and there is no way for users to remove or punish moderators. So this means that /r/$FOO is not actually a subreddit about $FOO, moderated so that exactly any non-spam discussion about $FOO is allowed, but rather a dictatorship ran by whoever happened to grab the name first. So for instance if a company creates a subreddit about their product before it's announced (which they are guaranteed to succeed at) or perhaps buys or acquires it afterwards, they are allowed to censor it arbitrarily to remove negative opinions or anything they don't like. Amateur moderators can instead moderate according to their personal agenda. The advantage that something like Reddit can have other normal forums is the existence of an higher authority that users that are banned or censored can petition to to have them ban the moderator instead, and it was pretty absurd that there used to be no way to do that.
- xoa 3y ago
  >The advantage that something like Reddit can have other normal forums is the existence of an higher authority that users that are banned or censored can petition to to have them ban the moderator instead OK, so now rather then an endless number of small competitive kingdoms, where if you don't like the actions of mods on a subreddit you can just make another subreddit (including in your company example, if the company does /r/$NEWPRODUCT and removes all negative opinions people can easily to /r/$NEWPRODUCT-community and run it as they wish instead) and then it's super easy for everyone to vote with their feet, you are arguing in favor of a single total dictatorship from which there is no escape except leaving the site. How is that an improvement? Why is it "pretty absurd" that all power wasn't completely centralized? >Amateur moderators can instead moderate according to their personal agenda. How does going to a "higher authority" (that is going public and fully driven by next quarter's numbers) change anything here? Why do you think that Reddit the public corporation is going to be somehow immune to any sort of amateur or arbitrary moderation actions you don't like?
- htag 3y ago
  A subreddit is not a dictatorship. Everyone that participates in the subreddit it doing so voluntarily. Your argument that Reddit has a higher authority that can deal with bad moderators just kicks the can. What if the Reddit universal mods abuse their power in the same ways your described?
freerobby 3y ago
Good. If mods want to withhold their own work and resign in protest, power to them. But right now they're hanging this all on mass censoring the work of their users. Screw that. Now, if users want to take down their own content in protest, also power to them.
- joshstrange 3y ago
  > Now, if users want to take down their own content in protest, also power to them. Except Reddit appears to be taking away that power and un-deleting/un-editing comments that user's are deleting/editing in protest.
seydor 3y ago
The users have been saying that for years. My god this company is bad
65 3y ago
Steve just wants this all to be over with so he can IPO, get his payday, and ride off into the sunset with millions of dollars. He doesn't care about Reddit or users or anything other than making huge money. Is it any surprise we see yet another socially awkward tech CEO value the only thing that makes sense to their brains: money?
timmg 3y ago
I can say, personally, I was not for the blackouts. It just seemed counter-productive to me. For whatever subs I subscribe to, that means the mods went against my will. Maybe I was a small minority. Maybe I was in the majority. Not sure how to tell...
0xDEF 3y ago
The powermods who are now leaving reddit are also the powermods who worked tirelessly to remove racist, anti-LGBT, and other bad content that would have pushed advertisers and potential investors away. These few hundred powermods volunteered as janitors for a filthy public toilet used by over 430 million users. Reddit is in deep trouble.
asciimov 3y ago
Reddit should deal with the bot problem before it suddenly goes all "democratic". But I just see this as a bunch of hot air, Huffman has a long history of not delivering on reddit promises, unless they effect his wallet.
ilyt 3y ago
it seens that power-hungry creep got annoyed unpaid workers did what the community wanted
fallinghawks 3y ago
Several subs im subscribed to have asked their users what they want to do: continued closure, closure once a week in protest, or open. They respect what their users want in as democratic a way possible. Mods are what make reddit work well. If a user doesn't like them, it's not like they're held against their will; there are other subs to check out and they can start their own if they want. Spez is trying to handwave and pretend the mods are hated monocled monopoly guys when it's actually him, and he's just continued to make the problem worse.
- snickerbockers 3y ago
  It depends on the subreddit, some of them really are run by power hungry assholes who will delete posts they disagree with and even ban users for disagreeing. I've also seen others where mods tolerate "popcorn" threads where prominent posters are allowed to spread rumors and make virulent accusations with no repercussions because these threads are interesting for everybody who's not directly involved. The only real problem with what spez is proposing is that it's obviously only intended to give Reddit's management a way to oust mods they don't like. If this was proposed in a vacuum I'd welcome more accountability for mods.
pokstad 3y ago
The fact that a discussion topic has centralized moderation is weird to me. Why should a group of biased imperfect individuals control a topic like r/news? Seems like a ripe area to develop automated moderation using the distinct preferences of each user.
- twelfthnight 3y ago
  Who would develop the automated moderation? Reddit? They would do so in a way that optimizes their profits, not your interests. There's no perfect solution. If you suggest "let users vote/democracy", then you'll start getting propaganda convincing people to vote for their agenda. If you leave the mods in charge then you get these mini dictatorships. If you let Reddit control then you get a profit seeking algorithm that stuffs any criticism of people who pay Reddit. One of these solutions is probably better than the others, but there are some major tradeoffs.
- isaacremuant 3y ago
  I'm sorry. Do you think HN is unmoderated? Unless you're in a very free speech leaning place, which are unfortunately and increasingly harder to find, every forum is modded and the mods hold varying degrees of influence. And the site wide admins, when there's such a thing, hold more.
  - pokstad 3y ago
    HN isn’t Reddit. I like HN moderation. I come here for the more niche HN discussions. Reddit is much larger than HN and attracts people from a very wide spectrum. A handful of moderators don’t always do the best job at that scale. Especially for larger subreddits.
    - isaacremuant 3y ago
      I don't think I understand how it relates to your initial point, then. The one about imperfect mods and topics.
  - CyberDildonics 3y ago
none_to_remain 3y ago
The fun part is for me Reddit was pretty much already dead, as these moderators degraded the content over the past several years. I made no big decision to boycott, just subreddits were driven below an interestingness/quality threshold and fell from my browsing, so the only one I've looked at regularly in a couple years is local r/nyc. (which didn't blackout) I blame the admins to the extent they encouraged and allowed this behavior, but I would say now I'm more hopeful for the future of Reddit than I was two weeks ago. To be clear I still expect failure, but at least they're making some effort at change.
- CamelCaseName 3y ago
  Reddit is dead in your opinion because they drove out the most passionate creators and moderators. Over years of inaction, or bad action. Chasing bad product ideas while ignoring key features.
joshstrange 3y ago
Lol, users have been asking for this since almost the start of Reddit, and Reddit only cares now because it actually is hitting them where it matters. This is always so annoying, when sites are stagnant for years and then suddenly they can pump out new features when it helps them even if people have been asking for forever. See also mod tools (though they have broken that promise more times than I can count) and shit like NFTs. "Can't improve or fix basic bugs but we have time to add the scam of the week to our platform". Reddit doesn't deserve to continue.
- bioemerl 3y ago
  Yeah, not only is this crazy a slap in the face to Reddit users who have wanted it for ages, it's also a slap in the face to people who make subs for their own stuff. So if I made a sub and I post to it, I build the content on it, some group of users can just vote me out randomly? Fuck that. They do such a thing and reddit becomes salted earth for anyone wanting to post their content on it, and for anyone wanting to run a community where they aren't popular/don't have an opinion in line with the hive mind. They needed to allow a more flexible moderation system and separate names of groups from the communities so that /r/games could dynamically change with time, but allowing the community to evict people from what they created is downright asinine.
  - Seattle3503 3y ago
    Agreed with what you said. There are topics, and there are communities. They often get conflate. Moderators of communities should feel some sense of ownership over the community. But they don't own the topic.
zamalek 3y ago
> If you're a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. You're also paid.
moomoo11 3y ago
Why not just hire moderators? Either in USA or global like in Ph, Nigeria, India, or E Europe where English is commonly spoken? At least for the main/top100 boards
willio58 3y ago
One bad decision after another. I know individual action doesn't really matter but I have deleted my Reddit account and hope others do the same.
casenmgreen 3y ago
The and the only reason the CEO is talking about this now is because it is the mods who are resisting his and Reddit management's awful behaviour. The CEO et al I would say have no concern about this issue as such - or it would have come over years ago - they are concerned, and concerned now, only because it is getting in their way. Reddit management to my eye has lost sight of the fact the Reddit exists because a very large number of people decided of their own free will to be there. The content generators do not belong to Reddit, nor is the content generated by Reddit. When large site owners come to imagine they own their site and can do what they like with it, as if the users belong to them, they can break their sites, because users leave - mySpace is the case in point.
readyplayernull 3y ago
The funny aspect of all this is how the whole conflict is being feeded by inverse psychology. Mods want to help Reddit notice that the new APIs fees are too high and will harm Reddit itself, to which Reddit could have set very low fees and then slightly increase them until they get a balance between users vs earnings. Instead they followed Musk's gonna-kick-your-ass ways. Will 2023 be considered the year of the Great Social Media Purge?
sp332 3y ago
A study from last year shows that paying Reddit mods $20/hour would only cost $3.4 million/year, or ~3% of revenue. https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/19318 https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/19318
- foolfoolz 3y ago
  a study from the last 17 years of reddit’s existence has shown you can pay them nothing and get all the value
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bioemerl 3y ago
Reddit is starting to seem genuinely spooked by what's happening here. Confidence implies inaction, so the fact they want to undelete things says to me that it's having a real impact and they are scared of it. Mister "this will pass" certainly doesn't seem to believe it's going to pass.
- MrBodangles 3y ago
  It was always obvious this would be the result, because spez is a manchild narcissist, thus incapable of understanding he is unfit for leadership… Though I doubt most of Reddit’s senior management is any better, given the way they’ve completely failed to understand their value proposition (or lack there of).
  - bioemerl 3y ago
    I don't think they've lacked understanding of their value proposition. They thought they had something worthy of capitalizing on, kind of like YouTube. And they could have capitalized quite a lot on Reddit, but I think they've screwed themselves over the last couple of years by pushing a bunch of features no one liked and not actually focusing on anything that would make them money. Like, I should be able to pay Reddit to be able to post high quality images and have them posted to all the users of the website without reliance on their shitty mobile app. I shouldn't be able to upload high quality images without paying, and that incentivizes me to give them money. What are they doing instead? They incentivize their shitty mobile app. I think they've dramatically overestimated their ability to make money and they've expanded the site to the point that they cant actually sustainably continue to maintain it. I have half a mind to believe they actually expected the third party developers to pay the outrageous fees and that that would help cover the costs of them running the website. I think Reddit is unsustainable and it's going to collapse in on itself and go into bankruptcy eventually. They will continue to fail to make money to support the bloated and shitty infrastructure and hiring practices they've put in place, and when they inevitably fail they will blame these terrible moderators and users for ruining the website. In reality it was their own greed and shameless lack of self-restriction the wind in terms of establishing their bloated and terrible infrastructure. But hey, they have an office in San Francisco so they're quite the lovely san francisco high-tech company that's making all sorts of money. And by money I mean investments.
sebstefan 3y ago
17 years of the worst mods on the planet abusing his website and now he's doing something.
slowmovintarget 3y ago
Ignoring the elephant and engaging with the premise: "More democracy" seems like a good thing, as long as it is balanced. There should be some recourse for a mod that actually enforces the rules of the sub (like removing political messages from subs that have rules against those sorts of things). I don't know how you'd do that on Reddit. All mods in a sub can vote to veto? That seems like they'd still have too much power. Appeal process? To whom?
- sebstefan 3y ago
  Whichever way he does that, the first thing people are going to do with it is fire the mods he just put in place to stop the blackouts
mlcrypto 3y ago
"senators should have term limit!" "I get to be a mod forever though"
- jackdh 3y ago
  Except on Reddit if you don't like it you can start a competing subreddit and users can 'Vote' by following you.
  - mlcrypto 3y ago
    "free markets dynamics are bad until they favor me!" I find most reddit users to very hypocritical
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  Last I checked mods couldn't pass laws/rules that would send police to your house or take x% of your income.
isanjay 3y ago
Many subreddits I visit asked users to vote btw.
PrimeMcFly 3y ago
He's right. As much as many mods do a great, fantastic job for free, there are those who abuse their power and the admins have always had no issue with that. Now that it's affecting them they do, so I hope they improve things even if it isn't for exactly the right reasons.
nextmove 3y ago
Why is everyone ok with ChatGPT scraping Reddit's data and selling it back to you for a $20/mo subscription, but cringe at the thought of Reddit making a profit from their API? If anything the users creating the content should be the ones being paid. Your neural nets (which are not intelligence) and 3rd party apps wouldn't work at all if normal people didn't take their time to post useful content.
- isaacremuant 3y ago
  Please go read about the problem before commenting a stramwan. Rarely anyone objects about the API having a price.
PM_me_your_math 3y ago
This is hilarious. The fact that he's just realizing this now confirms what I've said for years. Reddit mods act without oversight. It took them damaging his brand to act. Forgot that activist moderators fundamentally destroyed reddit with 1000 slow cuts.
leke 3y ago
Too powerful? Don't flatter yourself. I'm the creator and mod of a sub with 25K members. I'm really not happy with reddit and participated in the 48h blackout, so I'm a good example of what they're talking about. I'm done with them, but this shows you how much he's out of touch with the situation. > He said he planned to change the rules so users could vote them out of subbreddits. I've already posted my resignation notice and have stickied a post requesting applicants to take over the sub. People drunk on "power" do not relinquish their power voluntarily. Mods being "too powerful" are not the problem, because we are not interested in "power".
jerf 3y ago
On the one hand, if a subreddit is supposed to be a community it doesn't make sense for there to be a class of user, a "mod", of a multi-thousand user community that can't be dislodged even if literally every other member of that community wants them to be. That is clearly a highly artificial structure imposed on a community by rigid computer code. Let me acknowledge the obviously self-serving nature of this declaration, wrapped up in Truth, Justice and the American Way at a highly convenient time for Reddit, and dismiss it for the remainder of my post here, because I find social network game theory interesting as a hobby and want to discuss the mechanics and implications of having dislodgeable moderators. The problem I see is that there is no way to build this structure that isn't gameable in a world where everyone uses free emails and has ever-increasing access to an army of LLM and other sorts of bots. You can't build a system where a single person with a bee in their bonnet about some mod can simply marshal an army of bots to get them dislodged. The entire thing about moderation is that it produces a stream of people with bees in their bonnet, and the people who tend to get moderated are disproportionally those people. The bigger the sub, the larger the stream of such people. The nice guy who can't be bothered to start a vendetta probably wasn't a problem poster in the first place. You can't just "vote" them out by handing everyone in the world a vote. You can't hand a vote to everyone subscribed in the community. You could set a cutoff date but that is weird too. You could give participation points (voting, commenting) but those are easy to game too. There really isn't a way to define a "community" in a way that code can get a hold of it. Which means that in the end this is just going to be Reddit imposing its central views by fiat. That is not intrinsically morally wrong. The problem is that it's not Reddit today. I expect Reddit is calculating the result of its moves with a simple multiplication of how much money they expect to make on the same community, but if they manage to contract it significantly in the process the calculations won't hold. Moreover, even if they do lever open every single community tomorrow, the damage won't be visible tomorrow. It'll be slowly over the course of the next year or two. There won't be a day where anyone external will be able to point at and say "Look, this proves we were right!". There won't be a day when I'd be able to counter a "Citation?" with objective proof. Reddit will just... fade. One interaction at a time.
knome 3y ago
Strange that /r/programming has been in lockdown all week. Last I remember, ketralnis and spez were the top two mods on it. Seems like it would be pretty easy to pop it back out of private if they wanted to.
Balgair 3y ago
A point against the 'narrative': Mods are very hard to deal with as a business owner. Look, we all know that going to war with your volunteers is a bad idea. But the Mods, as individual people, are not easy to deal with. To me, modding any sub on reddit sounds like an insane thing to do. Why would you subject yourself to such a task? Especially for free? Anyone remember this interview?: https://www.foxnews.com/video/6294058584001 https://www.foxnews.com/video/6294058584001 Those are the real human people that reddit's ownership has to deal with. Only a thousand-fold and self-interacting. Herding cats seems like a very simple job now. Look, reddit is fundamentally changed. We all know it's going down. But Mods aren't the easiest people either. Reddit got fat off of the labor of, to me, people that are just built different. That check is now coming due.
game_the0ry 3y ago
It would be interesting if there was an equivalent of reddit where the mods are "democratically elected" by their own communities.
rich_sasha 3y ago
"After blackout". This made me smile. It is often said that if a product is free then you are not the user, you are the product. Here it is true, just the wrong way round: users are Reddit's product! And Reddit seems to have totally alienated its product! The product is saying, "go f*k yourself Reddit, we're not backing down". What is left of Reddit the company after they force their will on the users? No product I would think. Just managers and C-suite.
TheLKD70 3y ago
I mean I would actually agree with a little diplomacy, but I get the feeling as soon as this is implemented there'll suddenly be a bunch of brand new accounts spawned to vote out the moderators of those communities who are protesting right now...
saos 3y ago
I can get behind that push
vpastore 3y ago
[dead]
bastard_op 3y ago
I remember this company called reddit, people for some reason flocked around it, then they pissed everyone off and became irrelevant. Now if only Twitter would do the same in a prompt fashion. Musk tries hard, damn hard, but not has hard as Reddit to scuttle themselves. If nothing else so fools here stop posting twit links to twit news. Twitter gets no scripting access here, it doesn't really work anymore otherwise, so for me already dead, just wish others would catch up.
friend_and_foe 3y ago
[flagged]

diogenescynic 3y ago

Good riddance. The moderators are the worst part of Reddit. Just pay someone to do their job.

dralley 3y ago
If reddit isn't profitable now, they're certainly not going to be profitable without thousands of hours of unpaid labor being done for them.
hawk_ 3y ago
:-) Good luck finding a qualified paid army of mods doing this at reddit scale. Even if they manage to find, do they have the money?
- vezycash 3y ago
  Easy - go the google, make a deal with open ai for a mod bot that's just good enough.
- mardifoufs 3y ago
  Qualified? Is this a joke? Most of them are absolute losers. Almost every single powermod that is open about their real life identity turns out to fit exactly into the "usual suspect" mold (middle aged, usually white, usually nerdy and terminally online). There are screenshots of mods that moderate the most on Reddit begging and crying to not lose their moderator position. Here's a direct quote from one of the most powerful mod on Reddit on hearing they lost mod powers on a single sub: "I have no job, I dont meet people, have no money.I only have reddit. Please dont take reddit from me" Sure sound like a qualified, well adjusted moderating staff overall.
g4d 3y ago
I mean, they're better than branded subs being moderated by the brand. Imagine Disney just being given the ability to moderate all of the starwars or marvel subs.
jmclnx 3y ago
>The moderators are the worst part of Reddit. probably why you were down voted, I think the mods provide a decent service preventing it from degenerating into an echo chamber like truth-social >Just pay someone to do their job This I agree with, if the mods were paid well, maybe things would be better. Maybe a rule change like "If your group gets xxx many unique users posting content per day, you get paid X". But that can be abused too.
- prepend 3y ago
  > preventing it from degenerating into an echo chamber like truth-social I can’t compare to truth-social as Ive never used it. But big subs like /r/politics are definitely echo chambers and I think they are that way because the mods like it that way.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    It's even less likely that paid mods would change that though, they'd only make it worse because they'd only want to stick to a very narrow set of "safe" advertiser friendly opinions, just like most other social media.
    - prepend 3y ago
      Definitely. I think communities are more effective when the “elders” volunteer out of love to run. I don’t think you can pay people enough to make up for passion. This is based on experiences with community centers, game meetups, marathon planners, and dev communities. You usually have to have someone on the payroll, but having a high ratio of volunteers usually means higher quality community. My most clear example is the difference between hiking meetups that are just some people planning stuff vs the ones planned by REI. The REI ones are pretty fun, but the meetups are more thought out and better, I think.
- BlargMcLarg 3y ago
  >preventing it from degenerating into an echo chamber Reddit mods are notorious for creating echo chambers through 3rd party mod tools. You know, those tools autobanning about any account who happens to post on a sub they consider no-no, often regardless the context. If those tools weren't on the line, they wouldn't care to join the blackout.
asow92 3y ago
Agreed. Just my opinion: most mods I've encountered seem like smarmy, smug, and sanctimonious petty tyrants who need to touch grass.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bee_rider 3y ago
  Paradoxically the only places I’ve seen this “touch grass” sentiment used are full of people who… need to touch grass.
  - asow92 3y ago
    I've got about 2 acres of it if you wanna let them know. We can have a BBQ. Everybody's welcome.
- cheekibreeki2 3y ago
  Reminds me of r/philadelphia which was one point was modded by Europeans who didn't understand the city's roots.
pnemonic 3y ago
What a terrible, toxic capitalist take.
piva00 3y ago
A lot of well run subs would never exist in the first place without good mods. A very good example of that is /r/askhistorians, without a heavy enforcement of their guidelines the quality of that sub would be absolute trash. There are definitely a lot of bad mods, even more in popular subs, and even more in popular subs that are not centered around a community of hobbyist and/or fans. The value of reddit is not this trash though, it's the subs that are well moderated and curated to avoid the spamming, low effort/low quality content and so on. Because the torrent of low quality meme-like content can be found in any number of platforms: 9gag, imgur, etc. but very few places have a /r/askhistorians or a 30k active users community for a niche hobby.
- samstave 3y ago
  /u/mrgrimm founder of IMGUR should be charging Reddit for their API/'infra' (as spez was on NPR saying they pay "10s of millions per year for infra" to support third party apps - but they are "still talking to several apps"... IMGUR should pull a protest and charge reddit (although I assume they are already deep in bed together... you can type in any /r/ into IMGR.com/r/pics for example and get all the pics posted to /r/pics -- or any other sub.... The point being that IMGUR should be charging reddit for all the "infra" costs their traffic has on their "infra" -- EDIT : Can I sell my reddit accounts to some EU citizen for $1 (eu) such that you then own my account and can use GDPR laws to demand reddit delete my account/comments/history? (I have 17 years worth of comments on there) GDP-[REDDIT-COMMENT-DELETION-AS-A-SERVICE] GPT-GDPRCDAAS --- EDIT2 : /u/spez was again on NPR, where NPR stated that still "50% of the largest subs are still in protest" -- and then Spez stated that the business hasn't been impacted. So riddle me thus ;; If you can shutter 50% of your top subreddits without "significant impact to the business" , then how can you claim that you're paying "10s of millions" to "support" 3rd party API call apps, in 'infra' -- and this is 'unsustainable' yet killing '50% of top subs' has no impact on the business? /u/spez might want to consider subscribing to /r/theyDidTheMath EDIT3 : "https://gizmodo.com/subreddits-retreat-api-war-as-ceo-steve-huffman-demands-1850546883 https://gizmodo.com/subreddits-retreat-api-war-as-ceo-steve-... Has Reddit paid mods for un-blocking? Has Reddit paid ANY MODS EVER? Shouldnt this be in an SEC filing, if they are hedging for an IPO payout so /u/spez can go off into the tech sunset? Shouldnt Reddit be required to report which mods they paid off in the past? Should reddit be required to announce which MOD accounts are held as alts by actual employees (admins) of reddit?
dotnet00 3y ago
In addition to the issues everyone else has pointed out, unpaid volunteer mods give Reddit a lot of deniability. If they switched to paid mods, they'd become much more strict on what content and opinions they allow, because to advertisers, things would switch from "reddit allows communities to moderate themselves and can't be expected to catch everything we don't like", where reddit can still get away with some amount of unfriendly content as long as it doesn't get too prominent, to "it's reddit's job to make sure that all content is advertiser friendly". Similarly, if you have paid mods, what does that mean for subreddits which have the same topic, but were split over moderation disagreements? With volunteer mods that doesn't really matter to reddit, but if the mods cost reddit money, they'll want subs on the same topic to be consolidated, creating further friction and destroying communities.
berkle4455 3y ago
I like how you think Reddit has the spare capital to hire mods. VCs are running for the door (that’s why it’s an IPO) and index fund retail investors will be left holding the bag.

damnesian 3y ago

[flagged]

sdflhasjd 3y ago

I take it users will be able to vote out Admins and the CEO as well?

bpodgursky 3y ago
Why should the users have any vote over anything?
- jjkaczor 3y ago
  It's their content. Reddit wouldn't exist without user contributed, moderated and 'engaged' content.
  - dathinab 3y ago
    especially not without moderation without the ton of unpayed moderators they wouldn't be able to comply with hate speech laws (or comply by having moderation systems which are "out of context of the conversation" enough to drive a lot of users away) without it all the good content would be drowned by spam and other bad stuff in turn without moderators the most users would leave sooner or later
- andrewstuart2 3y ago
  Well, for one, they're the sole value prop for the site. They generate, rank, and curate the content in concert with mods and admins.
  - have_faith 3y ago
    Why don't the users go and do that somewhere else? genuine question, I don't use Reddit.
    - andrewstuart2 3y ago
      I think that's the emerging plan, yes.
    - 3y ago

AnotherGoodName 3y ago

Ha. There were some weird posts from new users in subreddits I frequent. 'we need to rise up against the mods the blackout is an outrage!' It was met with unanimous wtf is wrong with you, go outside. I get the feeling spez is creating new accounts and posting as them again.

aaomidi 3y ago
They can easily use shit like ChatGPT to astroturf tbh.
- conradfr 3y ago
  I can't find it but there was a screenshot the other day of a pro-reddit post which started with "I'm sorry, but I cannot fulfill that request."
  - aaomidi 3y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36361247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36361247
sarasasa28 3y ago
Well, I, for one, don't fucking care about third party apps (which make money mind you) Reddit is/was my first source of real human information for a lot of stuff (since google is unusable now). And this blackout was really a pain in the ass
- agentgumshoe 3y ago
  And just like a good old protest, it got it's point across with legal disruption. At least you're aware of the issues now, no?
- Y-bar 3y ago
  I do care about the third party apps because they assist moderators in doing their job (which has been done for free as a service to Reddit). And more personally, they provide accessibility support lacking both in the Reddit website and app. I am not a mod, and will literally no longer be able to use Reddit as well as I have had over the last years. The third-party developers have provided Reddit with tremendous value which is now lost.

smrtinsert 3y ago

There goes reddit. No one wants an unmoderated slop.

cm2012 3y ago
There will be plenty of people willing to be moderators, don't worry.
prepend 3y ago
I wouldn’t mind it. I moderate some smallish subs (5-10k users) and don’t really make many mod actions. Maybe 5 in the past 15 years. The subs are still pretty good as measured by increasing subscriber counts and my own enjoyment. I think the huge subs probably get a bunch of spam, but then I ignore them even with moderation.
- andrewmunsell 3y ago
  It's more than a spam problem, though: you only have to look as far as Twitter to see that lax moderation that allows toxic or illegal content to exist-- even on a small part of the site-- can begin to drive away advertisers across the whole site, which could turn into a death spiral for Reddit.
  - arbitrage 3y ago
    Oh no, won't someone think of the advertisers!?
  - prepend 3y ago
    I don’t care about that problem. The cost of running something like Reddit is so cheap. I’ve run bbs servers and it’s not free, but it’s really cheap. Reddit is just text if you stop hosting images and video. It was profitable 10 years ago. It just want “unicorn” “profitable” for a huge VC investment and IPO. I don’t care about that. Again, I’ve literally run subs for over a decade and haven’t seen this problem. Thousands of happy people are chugging along. No “toxic” material so far. I think the key ingredient may be some niche topic that doesn’t attract random people but some organizing interest.

lawn 3y ago

Translation: Reddit will take a heavier hand and stamp out any behavior they don't like. And the obvious next step is to sell control of subreddits to the highest bidder.

BashiBazouk 3y ago
Well, according to: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/reddit-ceo-slams-protest-leaders-says-hell-change-rules-that-could-end-rebellion/ar-AA1cBP7f https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/reddit-ceo-slams-pro... "Huffman said, though, that he’d like to see some form of revenue-sharing. “I would like subreddits to be able to be businesses if they choose,” he said, adding that’s “another conversation, but I think that’s the next frontier of Reddit.” You may not be far off...

zzzeek 3y ago

can we just have this thing become another Digg and go away already? this is so tedious

prepend 3y ago
I hope Digg is planning a DiggV5 for the reverse migration. It would be pretty funny if Kevin Rose bought Digg back and turned it into something not sucky that let’s people post links and comment on them. This could finally be his chance to make the twitter clone he always wanted.
- Sylamore 3y ago
  I was actually surprised to find that digg.com is still around, even though it mostly seems to be a reddit repost site in it's current iteration.
  - prepend 3y ago
    Yeah, I think they sold out to some private equity firm that tore it down, but I guess finds it profitable to repost stuff. I think it sold for $30M so I’m sure the current owners would give it up for pretty cheap. I wonder who uses it. Maybe it’s just a google seo farm or something (although I’ve never seen it in my results).

lagniappe 3y ago

Part of me knows that there are scores of users waiting for their 'turn' to be moderators if the current ones are voted out. I don't think the current moderators see/acknowledge this.

brainwave92 3y ago
Yeah exactly this
dathinab 3y ago
also most of them would at least one of 1. not stay moderators a long time, while a lot of people want to be mods most severely underestimate how time intensive it can be 2. want to be mods to abuse the power 3. would be quite bad at the job 4. would continue the protests sooner or later, because they do agree with the current mods on this point (but not other points so they take advantage of it) All of which would drive users and high quality content away long term. Not saying that there hasn't always been a lot of drama and power struggles around mods in reddit and that there aren't already bad mods and that this would be true for all new mods. Still in my experience while there are always scores of users who want to be mods you really don't want to give mod powers to the huge majority of them and doing so is a grate way to destroy your community.
flutas 3y ago
I think they know it. I think what they are betting on is those new mods will be completely inept compared to experienced ones and it will lead to the site becoming worse overall.

pier25 3y ago

Reddit wouldn't be what it is without mods. Good luck finding people that will work for free without a sense of ownership.

checker659 3y ago
I've been on reddit for the majority of its life. Mods are dime a dozen.
- darknavi 3y ago
  It really depends on the sub. Some subs have a lot of very specific rules and higher quality bar and then some are just a shit show of sub-specific content. Any community that operates with strict structure is done with dedicated mods and bots (which the mods manage).
- pier25 3y ago
  Maybe for some subs but not the good ones like r/AskHistorians
bdw5204 3y ago
There's an endless supply of people who want to moderate forums and are happy to do so for free even if they don't get to set the rules or operate as a dictator. The moderators who consider the lack of "a sense of ownership" a deal breaker are precisely the people you don't want as moderators. They're the ones who are likely interested in that power for the sake of abusing it to serve their own personal agenda rather than the good of the community. It's no different from why we don't want cops to be able to make their own laws (and why laws that are vague enough to give them discretion to act capriciously are bad laws).
- pier25 3y ago
  The problem is not the supply of mods, it's the commitment. Lots of people imagine they want to be mods but very few people really want to do the work.
3y ago

juujian 3y ago

Welcome to do all the moderating yourself Huffman. It's the task that all other social networks are constantly struggling with and coming up against laws and regulations, while Reddit had it somewhat figured out, or at least had some systems in place that are better than automated blanked removal. Way to shoot yourself in the foot.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> Welcome to do all the moderating yourself Huffman This is obviously the endgame. I don’t even think it would be that expensive.
- km3r 3y ago
  There are significantly more mods than reddit employees. Reddits already struggling to be profitable and you think they can afford to pay moderators?
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > significantly more mods than reddit employees. Reddits already struggling to be profitable and you think they can afford to pay moderators? They're going to sacrifice quality. In the short run, that will work. The smart move would be to moderate with a small, expensive lead and cheaper offshore, arund-the-world talent. (The brilliant move would be to negotiate, but Huffman has made this personal.) Keep in mind the power law nature of content. What makes Reddit charming is the long tail. What makes it profitable, in the short term, is the short end. They don't need to hire mods for every subreddit, just the large ones, and among those, only those rebelling and unwilling to relent.
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  > I don’t even think it would be that expensive. Agreed. I'll eat my hat if there aren't a few Reddit engineers working to leverage LLMs to make auto-moderation way more effective. I don't know how soon they'll get to the point of not needing any volunteer moderators, but I won't be surprised if within a year or so they have only professional supervisors for all the popular subreddits.

khalilravanna 3y ago

Quote from him in the NBC interview: “…a business owner can be fired by its shareholders…” You know, I think he may be on to something there. Maybe someone should look into that for oh, say, the CEO of Reddit.

pizzalife 3y ago
He doesn't seem to have a great way with words. If you are the owner (implying >50% ownership), you can't be fired by the shareholders. If you hold less than 50%, you are not the business owner.
- antman 3y ago
  If you have more than 50% and your actions are deemed to be against the company the minority stakeholders can ask legally to take control. Even if no actions are taken but your statements appear incoherent
  - Onavo 3y ago
    Minority owners can sue, but it doesn't mean they will win. Especially in this case spez is most likely the lightning rod for the board so Reddit can get a big fat IPO. If majority of the board is behind him, there's nothing minority owners can do except pray. Investors are happy to preach and virtue signal about the 'S' in ESG until hundreds of millions is on the line. Then you won't hear a peep from them.
- Retric 3y ago
  Under a few specific conditions minority shareholders can oust an owner CEO. Beyond board seats and voting rights, there is a duty to protect the interests of all shareholders not just the owner. So for example if the owner sells off assets to themselves below market rate it’s not ok. Similarly, if the owner CEO is in a coma, mental institution, etc they can be ousted.
- LordKeren 3y ago
  If Huffman had the foresight to not speak, this whole mess probably would have blown over by now. The API change upset mods. The AMA and these subsequent interviews have created genuine animosity that will bring large changes to Reddit. If the outcome will be good or bad is anyone’s guess. But it’s clear that many moderators are much more upset at Huffman’s behavior than the API changes.

ac130kz 3y ago

Let's just migrate to lemmy, reddit is EOL

Adiqq 3y ago
I agree, lemmy still has a lot of rough edges, but it would be better to depend on decentralized infrastructure, where no CEO will decide rules. In case of Reddit it's just beginning. I don't really care about API access, but they send clear signal that they only care about profits, not about users and community. What's next? They will require paid subscription to browse content created by users for free, because traffic generates costs and they "have to be profitable"? Today they still have huge userbase and it's their only advantage. There was Digg, there is Reddit and soon there will be next thing like lemmy.

DueDilligence 3y ago

[dead]

toss1 3y ago

Seems like the right time for someone to start a new site with similar capabilities, and maybe based on lessons learned, different legal and monetary arrangements with the stakeholders. More like a co-op structure?

dathinab 3y ago

ah yes unpayed people which don't just invest a ton of time and have to use a ton of 3rd party tooling to even make it viable and much more often have to coop with the social backslash of "moderation mistakes" have too much power by .... privating a subredit which likely wouldn't exit without them during a time when they can't moderate(1) it ... except that that and making it read only is pretty much the only responsible thing they can do (1): due to protesting, also somewhat due to the API changes but that is more complex

agentgumshoe 3y ago

Mods do whatever they like: "things are fine" Mods hurt potential profits: "mods too powerful, need to act" If the community doesn't like the mods, they can... create a new subreddit with new mods.

bogantech 3y ago
> If the community doesn't like the mods, they can... create a new subreddit with new mods. If mods are going to permanently set subs private then they should be seized and given to someone who will use it
- AnotherGoodName 3y ago
  Why not just create a new subreddit? Eg. /r/gaming became a meme ridden shitshow and someone made /r/games which bans memes and it's great. No need to seize anything. Let people go where they want.
  - lightbendover 3y ago
    Majority of users will not know about the new subreddit and simply be annoyed that the subreddit they visited for years is suddenly missing.
  - BuyMyBitcoins 3y ago
    The “just start your own [xyz]” rarely succeeds and isn’t a viable alternative.
- km3r 3y ago
  The polls I've seen on subs after the reopened have been largely in favor of continuing the blackout. The community supports this, adding a more direct ability to remove mods is just going to be abused by brigading.

rco8786 3y ago

This guy is so tone deaf it's astonishing

bhaak 3y ago

Every day that passes I’m getting more convinced that the best move to improve the likelihood of a successful IPO (which IMHO this whole API clusterfuck is all about) is to fire spez and install a sane CEO. How can it be that he is still in charge and hasn’t been fired years ago?

agentgumshoe 3y ago
Because the talent pool more broadly is probably lacking quality, lol.
cragfar 3y ago
A sane CEO would instantly ban all the participating mods of the larger subreddits. And then pick off the rest that didn't get the message.
- runesofdoom 3y ago
  And the same message would still be sent to every user who cares: whatever value you see here is worthless to us, the owners. You have no stake, and we value your experience only as a source of wealth extraction. A lot of users probably don't care. Others probably think that's a fine and proper thing. For myself, it's a reminder and a warning. The reminder is that Reddit is a Cthulhu-esque machine and cannot be trusted. Reddit and myself were always ships whose courses had happened to align, I have been warned that they are changing course to one I will not like. That's all fair enough, but far from admirable. But my takeaway is that the net value of Reddit, to me, is going to be negative for the forseeable future, so my own best course is to block it completely. Others can make their own choices.
fullshark 3y ago
Do you disagree with him here? Mods are too powerful, many have decided to try and murder the site because of something most users don't even care about. The idea that because I volunteered to moderate r/subcultureX for a few years I can make sure www.reddit.com/r/subcultureX can never direct to any content forever is ridiculous.

jarym 3y ago

> "What I'm suggesting as a pathway out is actually more democracy," If he wanted more democracy he would have listened more and sooner. He simply didn't like what he was hearing. But let's not confuse things - Reddit is a business that wants to IPO, democracy isn't what this is about by any measure. This mess keeps getting worse (for Reddit but also all the communities on it) and he clearly lacks the means to navigate his way out of it.

WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
Looks like they perfectly know what they are doing, and the plan is pretty clear to me, and they said it: "mods too powerful", to me this sounds like a government or a big company, they don't like when the people have too much power or when they unionize, so they turn authoritarian and totalitarian, Reddit is just like that, turning into something it shouldn't, I wouldn't be surprised if they were pressured by the CIA/NSA
leoldo 3y ago
[dead]

agentgumshoe 3y ago

Honestly, if mods can just be voted out by their community, it will be chaos and little noisy groups of people will ruin everything. I am thinking this is not so much a well thought out and reasoned opinion after weighing up historical behaviour on the platform, but a whiplash to a protest actually having effect. Just maybe...

AlexandrB 3y ago
It's pretty clear that /spez doesn't actually use reddit very much and doesn't really understand how it works "on the ground".
PM_me_your_math 3y ago
At least all those bot farms would have something else to do with their time.

fwef64 3y ago

I'm surprised that noone came up with a free (libre) alternative to reddit where each subreddit would be a deployable standalone server. Or is there a project like that that I'm unaware of?

icebraining 3y ago
There's Lemmy and Kbin.

OrvalWintermute 3y ago

I'm torn. There is a well-known cabal of reddit mods that control many of the most popular subreddits [1] and many of them act like the subs they mod are their personal fiefdoms. Some of them have been alleged to exploit their subs for financial gain, or personal karma gain [2] at the expense of regular users Some of these mods have operated in cahoots with Reddit Administration to squelch stories they didn't like [3], to push a political narrative, or to stop grass roots issues. While I recognize people should live harassment free, they need to operate with a great amount of editorial discretion to keep conversations on topic and apropos. [1] https://www.cracked.com/article_29675_the-secret-war-against-reddits-moderator-oligarchy.html https://www.cracked.com/article_29675_the-secret-war-against... [2] https://www.protocol.com/reddit-powermods-war https://www.protocol.com/reddit-powermods-war [3] https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/927/965/6c2.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/927/965/6c2...

aluminussoma 3y ago
Here is why I find it hard to believe there is a cabal of mods: what is their motivation for shutting down Reddit? If this is true, these fiefdom mods are hurting themselves financially and personally by keeping their subreddits shut down. The simplest explanation to me is that they protest because they care. It is not just Apollo. They don't like the overall direction Reddit is heading in.
- OrvalWintermute 3y ago
  > Here is why I find it hard to believe there is a cabal of mods: Reddit mods doing things like this is well known [1] [2] What is really strange is how the mods will tend to infiltrate a subreddit, get mod rights, and then bring over a bunch of other mods that are already cross-modding important subs across Reddit. This has led to weird situations where a few mods control much of Reddit's top subreddits [3] [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/modabuse/ https://old.reddit.com/r/modabuse/ [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/zk39a1/cmv_moderator_abuse_should_be_punished_more/ https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/zk39a1/cmv_mo... [3] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/reddit-92-of-the-top-500-moderators-list https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/reddit-92-of-the-top-5...

ofslidingfeet 3y ago

This has been an easily understood problem for years now. He tried to gaslight us about this problem for years, and now he's reaping what he sowed.

guardiangod 3y ago

The difference between Musk/Twitter and spez/Reddit is that the value of Reddit lies in its army of unpaid moderators, and Twitter's value lies in its brand recognition. When Musk took over and pissed off everyone, the only protest the users can do is to leave the platform. Some did but not enough to hurt Twitter. That's because the management (ie modding) is done by Twitter staff already. With a strong brand, Twitter survived. For reddit, the core value is the unpaid moderators. If those moderators leave, you now have a bunch of communities with no management. History shows any communities entering an anarchy (or worse sycophants assigned by Reddit) will not last long, or at least, will stop their organic growth and decline.

BlargMcLarg 3y ago
>If those moderators leave, Then they will find new ones. As long as Reddit has usecases, as long as the powertrip is worth the lack of ownership and poor tooling, there will be mods willing to moderate subs and feeling powerful and getting drunk off of it. 'Historically', this has happened in every social medium with moderation so far. There's no anarchy here. Most Redditors don't care for the mods in particular. If the underlying reason doesn't move them, a new generation of mods will take place and the cycle continues.
- guardiangod 3y ago
  >Most Redditors don't care for the mods in particular. Because the current batch of moderation work well enough. Now imagine the current batch leave, and the new ones take over are worse (and they will be worse since Reddit has shown that Reddit has direct control over the Moderators' position safety, if the actions are not aligned with Reddit's CEO. Some reasonable people will not like that.) Eventually the remaining good ones will be replace again, and after a few generation, only the bad moderators are left. For example, just look at every dictatorship government in the world. No dictator starts out hiring only bad officials. Everyone's benevolent with good intention. Eventually, the good officials gradually get push out and sycophants fill the rank.
  - BlargMcLarg 3y ago

activiation 3y ago

Can we get a third party to handle votes? I have a feeling voting might be rigged otherwise.

sam0x17 3y ago

It's really going down hill I hope someone makes an actually viable alternative. There is no good place to have discussions on a variety of topics on the internet anymore.

devit 3y ago

Well, that's accurate and indeed a major problem. Subreddit moderators, like unfortunately usually moderators everywhere, can act arbitrarily and there is no way for users to remove or punish moderators. So this means that /r/$FOO is not actually a subreddit about $FOO, moderated so that exactly any non-spam discussion about $FOO is allowed, but rather a dictatorship ran by whoever happened to grab the name first. So for instance if a company creates a subreddit about their product before it's announced (which they are guaranteed to succeed at) or perhaps buys or acquires it afterwards, they are allowed to censor it arbitrarily to remove negative opinions or anything they don't like. Amateur moderators can instead moderate according to their personal agenda. The advantage that something like Reddit can have other normal forums is the existence of an higher authority that users that are banned or censored can petition to to have them ban the moderator instead, and it was pretty absurd that there used to be no way to do that.

xoa 3y ago
>The advantage that something like Reddit can have other normal forums is the existence of an higher authority that users that are banned or censored can petition to to have them ban the moderator instead OK, so now rather then an endless number of small competitive kingdoms, where if you don't like the actions of mods on a subreddit you can just make another subreddit (including in your company example, if the company does /r/$NEWPRODUCT and removes all negative opinions people can easily to /r/$NEWPRODUCT-community and run it as they wish instead) and then it's super easy for everyone to vote with their feet, you are arguing in favor of a single total dictatorship from which there is no escape except leaving the site. How is that an improvement? Why is it "pretty absurd" that all power wasn't completely centralized? >Amateur moderators can instead moderate according to their personal agenda. How does going to a "higher authority" (that is going public and fully driven by next quarter's numbers) change anything here? Why do you think that Reddit the public corporation is going to be somehow immune to any sort of amateur or arbitrary moderation actions you don't like?
htag 3y ago
A subreddit is not a dictatorship. Everyone that participates in the subreddit it doing so voluntarily. Your argument that Reddit has a higher authority that can deal with bad moderators just kicks the can. What if the Reddit universal mods abuse their power in the same ways your described?

freerobby 3y ago

Good. If mods want to withhold their own work and resign in protest, power to them. But right now they're hanging this all on mass censoring the work of their users. Screw that. Now, if users want to take down their own content in protest, also power to them.

joshstrange 3y ago
> Now, if users want to take down their own content in protest, also power to them. Except Reddit appears to be taking away that power and un-deleting/un-editing comments that user's are deleting/editing in protest.

seydor 3y ago

The users have been saying that for years. My god this company is bad

65 3y ago

Steve just wants this all to be over with so he can IPO, get his payday, and ride off into the sunset with millions of dollars. He doesn't care about Reddit or users or anything other than making huge money. Is it any surprise we see yet another socially awkward tech CEO value the only thing that makes sense to their brains: money?

timmg 3y ago

I can say, personally, I was not for the blackouts. It just seemed counter-productive to me. For whatever subs I subscribe to, that means the mods went against my will. Maybe I was a small minority. Maybe I was in the majority. Not sure how to tell...

0xDEF 3y ago

The powermods who are now leaving reddit are also the powermods who worked tirelessly to remove racist, anti-LGBT, and other bad content that would have pushed advertisers and potential investors away. These few hundred powermods volunteered as janitors for a filthy public toilet used by over 430 million users. Reddit is in deep trouble.

asciimov 3y ago

Reddit should deal with the bot problem before it suddenly goes all "democratic". But I just see this as a bunch of hot air, Huffman has a long history of not delivering on reddit promises, unless they effect his wallet.

ilyt 3y ago

it seens that power-hungry creep got annoyed unpaid workers did what the community wanted

fallinghawks 3y ago

Several subs im subscribed to have asked their users what they want to do: continued closure, closure once a week in protest, or open. They respect what their users want in as democratic a way possible. Mods are what make reddit work well. If a user doesn't like them, it's not like they're held against their will; there are other subs to check out and they can start their own if they want. Spez is trying to handwave and pretend the mods are hated monocled monopoly guys when it's actually him, and he's just continued to make the problem worse.

snickerbockers 3y ago
It depends on the subreddit, some of them really are run by power hungry assholes who will delete posts they disagree with and even ban users for disagreeing. I've also seen others where mods tolerate "popcorn" threads where prominent posters are allowed to spread rumors and make virulent accusations with no repercussions because these threads are interesting for everybody who's not directly involved. The only real problem with what spez is proposing is that it's obviously only intended to give Reddit's management a way to oust mods they don't like. If this was proposed in a vacuum I'd welcome more accountability for mods.

pokstad 3y ago

The fact that a discussion topic has centralized moderation is weird to me. Why should a group of biased imperfect individuals control a topic like r/news? Seems like a ripe area to develop automated moderation using the distinct preferences of each user.

twelfthnight 3y ago
Who would develop the automated moderation? Reddit? They would do so in a way that optimizes their profits, not your interests. There's no perfect solution. If you suggest "let users vote/democracy", then you'll start getting propaganda convincing people to vote for their agenda. If you leave the mods in charge then you get these mini dictatorships. If you let Reddit control then you get a profit seeking algorithm that stuffs any criticism of people who pay Reddit. One of these solutions is probably better than the others, but there are some major tradeoffs.
isaacremuant 3y ago
I'm sorry. Do you think HN is unmoderated? Unless you're in a very free speech leaning place, which are unfortunately and increasingly harder to find, every forum is modded and the mods hold varying degrees of influence. And the site wide admins, when there's such a thing, hold more.
- pokstad 3y ago
  HN isn’t Reddit. I like HN moderation. I come here for the more niche HN discussions. Reddit is much larger than HN and attracts people from a very wide spectrum. A handful of moderators don’t always do the best job at that scale. Especially for larger subreddits.
  - isaacremuant 3y ago
    I don't think I understand how it relates to your initial point, then. The one about imperfect mods and topics.
- CyberDildonics 3y ago

none_to_remain 3y ago

The fun part is for me Reddit was pretty much already dead, as these moderators degraded the content over the past several years. I made no big decision to boycott, just subreddits were driven below an interestingness/quality threshold and fell from my browsing, so the only one I've looked at regularly in a couple years is local r/nyc. (which didn't blackout) I blame the admins to the extent they encouraged and allowed this behavior, but I would say now I'm more hopeful for the future of Reddit than I was two weeks ago. To be clear I still expect failure, but at least they're making some effort at change.

CamelCaseName 3y ago
Reddit is dead in your opinion because they drove out the most passionate creators and moderators. Over years of inaction, or bad action. Chasing bad product ideas while ignoring key features.

joshstrange 3y ago

Lol, users have been asking for this since almost the start of Reddit, and Reddit only cares now because it actually is hitting them where it matters. This is always so annoying, when sites are stagnant for years and then suddenly they can pump out new features when it helps them even if people have been asking for forever. See also mod tools (though they have broken that promise more times than I can count) and shit like NFTs. "Can't improve or fix basic bugs but we have time to add the scam of the week to our platform". Reddit doesn't deserve to continue.

bioemerl 3y ago
Yeah, not only is this crazy a slap in the face to Reddit users who have wanted it for ages, it's also a slap in the face to people who make subs for their own stuff. So if I made a sub and I post to it, I build the content on it, some group of users can just vote me out randomly? Fuck that. They do such a thing and reddit becomes salted earth for anyone wanting to post their content on it, and for anyone wanting to run a community where they aren't popular/don't have an opinion in line with the hive mind. They needed to allow a more flexible moderation system and separate names of groups from the communities so that /r/games could dynamically change with time, but allowing the community to evict people from what they created is downright asinine.
- Seattle3503 3y ago
  Agreed with what you said. There are topics, and there are communities. They often get conflate. Moderators of communities should feel some sense of ownership over the community. But they don't own the topic.

zamalek 3y ago

> If you're a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. You're also paid.

moomoo11 3y ago

Why not just hire moderators? Either in USA or global like in Ph, Nigeria, India, or E Europe where English is commonly spoken? At least for the main/top100 boards

willio58 3y ago

One bad decision after another. I know individual action doesn't really matter but I have deleted my Reddit account and hope others do the same.

casenmgreen 3y ago

The and the only reason the CEO is talking about this now is because it is the mods who are resisting his and Reddit management's awful behaviour. The CEO et al I would say have no concern about this issue as such - or it would have come over years ago - they are concerned, and concerned now, only because it is getting in their way. Reddit management to my eye has lost sight of the fact the Reddit exists because a very large number of people decided of their own free will to be there. The content generators do not belong to Reddit, nor is the content generated by Reddit. When large site owners come to imagine they own their site and can do what they like with it, as if the users belong to them, they can break their sites, because users leave - mySpace is the case in point.

readyplayernull 3y ago

The funny aspect of all this is how the whole conflict is being feeded by inverse psychology. Mods want to help Reddit notice that the new APIs fees are too high and will harm Reddit itself, to which Reddit could have set very low fees and then slightly increase them until they get a balance between users vs earnings. Instead they followed Musk's gonna-kick-your-ass ways. Will 2023 be considered the year of the Great Social Media Purge?

sp332 3y ago

A study from last year shows that paying Reddit mods $20/hour would only cost $3.4 million/year, or ~3% of revenue. https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/19318 https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/19318

foolfoolz 3y ago
a study from the last 17 years of reddit’s existence has shown you can pay them nothing and get all the value

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bioemerl 3y ago

Reddit is starting to seem genuinely spooked by what's happening here. Confidence implies inaction, so the fact they want to undelete things says to me that it's having a real impact and they are scared of it. Mister "this will pass" certainly doesn't seem to believe it's going to pass.

MrBodangles 3y ago
It was always obvious this would be the result, because spez is a manchild narcissist, thus incapable of understanding he is unfit for leadership… Though I doubt most of Reddit’s senior management is any better, given the way they’ve completely failed to understand their value proposition (or lack there of).
- bioemerl 3y ago
  I don't think they've lacked understanding of their value proposition. They thought they had something worthy of capitalizing on, kind of like YouTube. And they could have capitalized quite a lot on Reddit, but I think they've screwed themselves over the last couple of years by pushing a bunch of features no one liked and not actually focusing on anything that would make them money. Like, I should be able to pay Reddit to be able to post high quality images and have them posted to all the users of the website without reliance on their shitty mobile app. I shouldn't be able to upload high quality images without paying, and that incentivizes me to give them money. What are they doing instead? They incentivize their shitty mobile app. I think they've dramatically overestimated their ability to make money and they've expanded the site to the point that they cant actually sustainably continue to maintain it. I have half a mind to believe they actually expected the third party developers to pay the outrageous fees and that that would help cover the costs of them running the website. I think Reddit is unsustainable and it's going to collapse in on itself and go into bankruptcy eventually. They will continue to fail to make money to support the bloated and shitty infrastructure and hiring practices they've put in place, and when they inevitably fail they will blame these terrible moderators and users for ruining the website. In reality it was their own greed and shameless lack of self-restriction the wind in terms of establishing their bloated and terrible infrastructure. But hey, they have an office in San Francisco so they're quite the lovely san francisco high-tech company that's making all sorts of money. And by money I mean investments.

sebstefan 3y ago

17 years of the worst mods on the planet abusing his website and now he's doing something.

slowmovintarget 3y ago

Ignoring the elephant and engaging with the premise: "More democracy" seems like a good thing, as long as it is balanced. There should be some recourse for a mod that actually enforces the rules of the sub (like removing political messages from subs that have rules against those sorts of things). I don't know how you'd do that on Reddit. All mods in a sub can vote to veto? That seems like they'd still have too much power. Appeal process? To whom?

sebstefan 3y ago
Whichever way he does that, the first thing people are going to do with it is fire the mods he just put in place to stop the blackouts

mlcrypto 3y ago

"senators should have term limit!" "I get to be a mod forever though"

jackdh 3y ago
Except on Reddit if you don't like it you can start a competing subreddit and users can 'Vote' by following you.
- mlcrypto 3y ago
  "free markets dynamics are bad until they favor me!" I find most reddit users to very hypocritical
AlexandrB 3y ago
Last I checked mods couldn't pass laws/rules that would send police to your house or take x% of your income.

isanjay 3y ago

Many subreddits I visit asked users to vote btw.

PrimeMcFly 3y ago

He's right. As much as many mods do a great, fantastic job for free, there are those who abuse their power and the admins have always had no issue with that. Now that it's affecting them they do, so I hope they improve things even if it isn't for exactly the right reasons.

nextmove 3y ago

Why is everyone ok with ChatGPT scraping Reddit's data and selling it back to you for a $20/mo subscription, but cringe at the thought of Reddit making a profit from their API? If anything the users creating the content should be the ones being paid. Your neural nets (which are not intelligence) and 3rd party apps wouldn't work at all if normal people didn't take their time to post useful content.

isaacremuant 3y ago
Please go read about the problem before commenting a stramwan. Rarely anyone objects about the API having a price.

PM_me_your_math 3y ago

This is hilarious. The fact that he's just realizing this now confirms what I've said for years. Reddit mods act without oversight. It took them damaging his brand to act. Forgot that activist moderators fundamentally destroyed reddit with 1000 slow cuts.

leke 3y ago

Too powerful? Don't flatter yourself. I'm the creator and mod of a sub with 25K members. I'm really not happy with reddit and participated in the 48h blackout, so I'm a good example of what they're talking about. I'm done with them, but this shows you how much he's out of touch with the situation. > He said he planned to change the rules so users could vote them out of subbreddits. I've already posted my resignation notice and have stickied a post requesting applicants to take over the sub. People drunk on "power" do not relinquish their power voluntarily. Mods being "too powerful" are not the problem, because we are not interested in "power".

jerf 3y ago

On the one hand, if a subreddit is supposed to be a community it doesn't make sense for there to be a class of user, a "mod", of a multi-thousand user community that can't be dislodged even if literally every other member of that community wants them to be. That is clearly a highly artificial structure imposed on a community by rigid computer code. Let me acknowledge the obviously self-serving nature of this declaration, wrapped up in Truth, Justice and the American Way at a highly convenient time for Reddit, and dismiss it for the remainder of my post here, because I find social network game theory interesting as a hobby and want to discuss the mechanics and implications of having dislodgeable moderators. The problem I see is that there is no way to build this structure that isn't gameable in a world where everyone uses free emails and has ever-increasing access to an army of LLM and other sorts of bots. You can't build a system where a single person with a bee in their bonnet about some mod can simply marshal an army of bots to get them dislodged. The entire thing about moderation is that it produces a stream of people with bees in their bonnet, and the people who tend to get moderated are disproportionally those people. The bigger the sub, the larger the stream of such people. The nice guy who can't be bothered to start a vendetta probably wasn't a problem poster in the first place. You can't just "vote" them out by handing everyone in the world a vote. You can't hand a vote to everyone subscribed in the community. You could set a cutoff date but that is weird too. You could give participation points (voting, commenting) but those are easy to game too. There really isn't a way to define a "community" in a way that code can get a hold of it. Which means that in the end this is just going to be Reddit imposing its central views by fiat. That is not intrinsically morally wrong. The problem is that it's not Reddit today. I expect Reddit is calculating the result of its moves with a simple multiplication of how much money they expect to make on the same community, but if they manage to contract it significantly in the process the calculations won't hold. Moreover, even if they do lever open every single community tomorrow, the damage won't be visible tomorrow. It'll be slowly over the course of the next year or two. There won't be a day where anyone external will be able to point at and say "Look, this proves we were right!". There won't be a day when I'd be able to counter a "Citation?" with objective proof. Reddit will just... fade. One interaction at a time.

knome 3y ago

Strange that /r/programming has been in lockdown all week. Last I remember, ketralnis and spez were the top two mods on it. Seems like it would be pretty easy to pop it back out of private if they wanted to.

Balgair 3y ago

A point against the 'narrative': Mods are very hard to deal with as a business owner. Look, we all know that going to war with your volunteers is a bad idea. But the Mods, as individual people, are not easy to deal with. To me, modding any sub on reddit sounds like an insane thing to do. Why would you subject yourself to such a task? Especially for free? Anyone remember this interview?: https://www.foxnews.com/video/6294058584001 https://www.foxnews.com/video/6294058584001 Those are the real human people that reddit's ownership has to deal with. Only a thousand-fold and self-interacting. Herding cats seems like a very simple job now. Look, reddit is fundamentally changed. We all know it's going down. But Mods aren't the easiest people either. Reddit got fat off of the labor of, to me, people that are just built different. That check is now coming due.

game_the0ry 3y ago

It would be interesting if there was an equivalent of reddit where the mods are "democratically elected" by their own communities.

rich_sasha 3y ago

"After blackout". This made me smile. It is often said that if a product is free then you are not the user, you are the product. Here it is true, just the wrong way round: users are Reddit's product! And Reddit seems to have totally alienated its product! The product is saying, "go f*k yourself Reddit, we're not backing down". What is left of Reddit the company after they force their will on the users? No product I would think. Just managers and C-suite.

TheLKD70 3y ago

I mean I would actually agree with a little diplomacy, but I get the feeling as soon as this is implemented there'll suddenly be a bunch of brand new accounts spawned to vote out the moderators of those communities who are protesting right now...

saos 3y ago

I can get behind that push

vpastore 3y ago

[dead]

bastard_op 3y ago

I remember this company called reddit, people for some reason flocked around it, then they pissed everyone off and became irrelevant. Now if only Twitter would do the same in a prompt fashion. Musk tries hard, damn hard, but not has hard as Reddit to scuttle themselves. If nothing else so fools here stop posting twit links to twit news. Twitter gets no scripting access here, it doesn't really work anymore otherwise, so for me already dead, just wish others would catch up.

friend_and_foe 3y ago

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