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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 rec

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
    Your assumption relies entirely on the difference between new and old being a noticeable, significant bad. Nothing in this story implies noticeable, let alone significant. Old Reddit to New Reddit was noticeable and growth continued. The push from browser to app was a noticeable bad, an intended one, and Reddit still grew. You seriously underestimate the passivity of most users. Reddit has, by all regards, truly messed up several times and still went on. It'll become a problem when mod quality is obviously, significantly worse, and no sooner than that.
    - guardiangod 3y ago
      >Your assumption relies entirely on the difference between new and old being a noticeable, significant bad. Because we are in generation 1. What about X generations later? As for the UI change. That's a completely different topic and I am not sure why you are bringing this up. The UI change doesn't change the content/moderation of the communities. >It'll become a problem when mod quality is obviously, significantly worse, and no sooner than that. And I am predicting the mod (thus content) quality will eventually be significantly worse because of this action by the CEO. Edit: The parent post edited his post so the arguments are now don't quite directly counter his points. Now it seems like I am strawman-ing. Why would you do that?
      - BlargMcLarg 3y ago
        >What about X generations later? X generations later the number of possible mutations are so big you'd be grasping to point at this as 'the' moment Reddit messed up, unless the statistics clearly indicate it (at which point you can still argue against it). For each person like you who said 'this API change was the moment things fell apart', you'll get another pointing out Reddit mobile, new Reddit, spez becoming CEO, the other incidents they scapegoated onto someone, and more. Even now, people could argue the worst thing happening isn't the mods being replaced, but Reddit allowing mods to put popular subs on private. The way things are going, those two events will be so close together they'd be practically indistinguishable in the grand scheme. >As for the UI change. That's a completely different topic and I am not sure why you are bringing this up. No it's not. It boils down to the same thing: UX experience degradation. Redditors have been on the receiving end of UX degradation for more than a decade now. Your whole argument relies on new moderation making UX bad enough to drive users away. >And I am predicting the mod (thus content) quality will eventually be significantly worse Great, like almost everybody, nothing new. Only difference being, you set your forecast on 'in some day in the future' now, which wasn't at all clear from your OP, rather than 'this is the event that will kill Reddit in the next 3 months' everybody is proclaiming it as.
- oytis 3y ago
  I do not care for the mods themselves, but I do care for their output - which is that each community has its own vibe and rules. Also the Reddit strike showed that powerful moderators are great for self-organisation - nothing like that would be possible if moderators could not shut down the communities, users on their own can't realistically self-organise for action like that.
- Zetobal 3y ago
  The thing with mods is even if you don't recognize their value shape how a community works. If dang wasn't working on HN it would be a different place would it be better or worse? We don't know. If it's ok for reddit to reshape their communities it's fine to replace them but random mods are not a drop in replacement.
  - BlargMcLarg 3y ago
    You're making my point for me. People are already assuming the new moderation will be noticeably worse to a significant degree, and using that assumption to assert their position as absolute. You know, in a place full of software devs who routinely mess up estimating something far more similar to their past experiences.
    - Zetobal 3y ago
      No, I said it will be different and as we learned numerous amounts people hate change. The kneecapped their growth with their redesign and now this shit show.
  - rootusrootus 3y ago
    This is a good point, and explains why HN is comparatively quite good while a large number of subreddits (especially the biggest ones) are a complete shitshow. The problem that I see is that many subreddit mods erroneously think they are Dan-level.
- kevinmchugh 3y ago
  I don't totally disagree, but mods without good tooling are dead in the water, and reddit has failed for years to build good mod tooling.
  - arbitrage 3y ago
    Reddit has seriously improved their mod tools in recent years. I really don't understand these complaints. I'm not a sock puppet, I just don't see the validity in saying over and over that the mod tools are bad, when they are clearly not and work for quite a lot of mods.
- cocojumbo123 3y ago
  > Then they will find new ones. Looks easier than it actually is. Here's how a mod routine looks like: check modqueue (that's the place where all reports come). Some are fake because one user has some beef with another, some trolls, some spam, some user insulting each-other. you work through the queue, by the time you are done users who were banned are already complaining on modmail, you take your time to read all complaints and try to shrug the threats and the attempted doxing. you get a thank you for each 100 threats. rinse and repeat. whereas it might look glamorous from the outside in practice is boring, repetitive and tedious. in large subs you also have to coordinate with other mods to make sure there is some consistency in modding actions. finding new mods is easy, having them stick around, I'd say not so much.
  - arbitrage 3y ago
    Reddit came down hard on threatening mods the other year. Did you forget, or are you omitting that on purpose to strengthen your argument? If you're a mod, and get threatened, ban the user. It's simple. Move on with your life. 90% of your problems in Reddit are caused by 10% of the people. Get rid of the trouble makers and your job is a cakewalk. Is this really that difficult to reason through?
    - pavel_lishin 3y ago
      > If you're a mod, and get threatened, ban the user. It's simple. Move on with your life. Have you ever moderated a sufficiently large community?
    - cocojumbo123 3y ago
      > If you're a mod, and get threatened, ban the user. threats always come after the ban and is trivial to create a new account and continue the threats. the complaints about mod harrassment are as old as reddit but spez always promissed solutions and never delivered. heck, my sub had its mod discussion archive leaked - on reddit!, we reported it to admins repatedly and they did a big nothing. one of my mod colleagues got doxxed and had a banned user ringing at his very physical door demanding "to discuss the issue", how would you feel about it ? edit: and this is a boring country sub, I can't even imagine what modding a political sub is like.
shmatt 3y ago
except you don't need to be born a chosen one to become a mod. its not rocket science, and plenty of people want the power have you every thought to yourself, wow, /r/pics is so much better since /u/DM_ME_BOOGERS joined the mod team, I really feel like there was a pre-2019 /r/pics and a post-2019 /r/pics People don't even notice that mod teams could have completely rotated out this year and they didn't feel a thing edit: ill add an example, /u/Cyxie up until a couple years ago, moderated 20% of the top 500 subreddits, their user is now deleted Has anyone felt reddit is worse these days since they left? Is the day they left widely known as the day Reddit became bad? Heres your answer: no one cares about Cyxie, Reddit was fine before them, during their tenure, and after they deleted their account
- ilyt 3y ago
  Pretty much, people only notice when mod team decides to make significant changes to how subreddit works (banning certain types of posts etc.), not the power-hungry individual at hand
- sudhirkhanger 3y ago
  You can pretty much leave communities in auto mode and nothing will happen. A few posts will get blocked. A few people will get annoyed. It is both difficult to encourage and discourage people to participate in Reddit communities.
- foolfoolz 3y ago
  there’s always more people who want to mod. mods don’t own the content. i would expect reddit to have a rule saying if a reddit has over 1,000 posts it can’t go private. there’s already a ton of mod power and they can make money by keeping clearly paid content active
- thesh4d0w 3y ago
  R/pics isn't exactly an example of a high quality subreddit. Try the same thing on a subject domain specific sub, where the mods actively police the quality of comments. Askscience for example.
  - 3y ago
seydor 3y ago
> its army of unpaid moderators This meme has been a bit overdone. I think this protest shows another angle: Reddit has been providing moderators a place to feel special and superior for free, and they are now addicted to it. Look, reddit is opening the door and tells them to leave but the vast majority DONT and won't leave. This is revealing who is dependent on whom.

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
  Your assumption relies entirely on the difference between new and old being a noticeable, significant bad. Nothing in this story implies noticeable, let alone significant. Old Reddit to New Reddit was noticeable and growth continued. The push from browser to app was a noticeable bad, an intended one, and Reddit still grew. You seriously underestimate the passivity of most users. Reddit has, by all regards, truly messed up several times and still went on. It'll become a problem when mod quality is obviously, significantly worse, and no sooner than that.
  - guardiangod 3y ago
    >Your assumption relies entirely on the difference between new and old being a noticeable, significant bad. Because we are in generation 1. What about X generations later? As for the UI change. That's a completely different topic and I am not sure why you are bringing this up. The UI change doesn't change the content/moderation of the communities. >It'll become a problem when mod quality is obviously, significantly worse, and no sooner than that. And I am predicting the mod (thus content) quality will eventually be significantly worse because of this action by the CEO. Edit: The parent post edited his post so the arguments are now don't quite directly counter his points. Now it seems like I am strawman-ing. Why would you do that?
    - BlargMcLarg 3y ago
      >What about X generations later? X generations later the number of possible mutations are so big you'd be grasping to point at this as 'the' moment Reddit messed up, unless the statistics clearly indicate it (at which point you can still argue against it). For each person like you who said 'this API change was the moment things fell apart', you'll get another pointing out Reddit mobile, new Reddit, spez becoming CEO, the other incidents they scapegoated onto someone, and more. Even now, people could argue the worst thing happening isn't the mods being replaced, but Reddit allowing mods to put popular subs on private. The way things are going, those two events will be so close together they'd be practically indistinguishable in the grand scheme. >As for the UI change. That's a completely different topic and I am not sure why you are bringing this up. No it's not. It boils down to the same thing: UX experience degradation. Redditors have been on the receiving end of UX degradation for more than a decade now. Your whole argument relies on new moderation making UX bad enough to drive users away. >And I am predicting the mod (thus content) quality will eventually be significantly worse Great, like almost everybody, nothing new. Only difference being, you set your forecast on 'in some day in the future' now, which wasn't at all clear from your OP, rather than 'this is the event that will kill Reddit in the next 3 months' everybody is proclaiming it as.
oytis 3y ago
I do not care for the mods themselves, but I do care for their output - which is that each community has its own vibe and rules. Also the Reddit strike showed that powerful moderators are great for self-organisation - nothing like that would be possible if moderators could not shut down the communities, users on their own can't realistically self-organise for action like that.
Zetobal 3y ago
The thing with mods is even if you don't recognize their value shape how a community works. If dang wasn't working on HN it would be a different place would it be better or worse? We don't know. If it's ok for reddit to reshape their communities it's fine to replace them but random mods are not a drop in replacement.
- BlargMcLarg 3y ago
  You're making my point for me. People are already assuming the new moderation will be noticeably worse to a significant degree, and using that assumption to assert their position as absolute. You know, in a place full of software devs who routinely mess up estimating something far more similar to their past experiences.
  - Zetobal 3y ago
    No, I said it will be different and as we learned numerous amounts people hate change. The kneecapped their growth with their redesign and now this shit show.
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  This is a good point, and explains why HN is comparatively quite good while a large number of subreddits (especially the biggest ones) are a complete shitshow. The problem that I see is that many subreddit mods erroneously think they are Dan-level.
kevinmchugh 3y ago
I don't totally disagree, but mods without good tooling are dead in the water, and reddit has failed for years to build good mod tooling.
- arbitrage 3y ago
  Reddit has seriously improved their mod tools in recent years. I really don't understand these complaints. I'm not a sock puppet, I just don't see the validity in saying over and over that the mod tools are bad, when they are clearly not and work for quite a lot of mods.
cocojumbo123 3y ago
> Then they will find new ones. Looks easier than it actually is. Here's how a mod routine looks like: check modqueue (that's the place where all reports come). Some are fake because one user has some beef with another, some trolls, some spam, some user insulting each-other. you work through the queue, by the time you are done users who were banned are already complaining on modmail, you take your time to read all complaints and try to shrug the threats and the attempted doxing. you get a thank you for each 100 threats. rinse and repeat. whereas it might look glamorous from the outside in practice is boring, repetitive and tedious. in large subs you also have to coordinate with other mods to make sure there is some consistency in modding actions. finding new mods is easy, having them stick around, I'd say not so much.
- arbitrage 3y ago
  Reddit came down hard on threatening mods the other year. Did you forget, or are you omitting that on purpose to strengthen your argument? If you're a mod, and get threatened, ban the user. It's simple. Move on with your life. 90% of your problems in Reddit are caused by 10% of the people. Get rid of the trouble makers and your job is a cakewalk. Is this really that difficult to reason through?
  - pavel_lishin 3y ago
    > If you're a mod, and get threatened, ban the user. It's simple. Move on with your life. Have you ever moderated a sufficiently large community?
  - cocojumbo123 3y ago
    > If you're a mod, and get threatened, ban the user. threats always come after the ban and is trivial to create a new account and continue the threats. the complaints about mod harrassment are as old as reddit but spez always promissed solutions and never delivered. heck, my sub had its mod discussion archive leaked - on reddit!, we reported it to admins repatedly and they did a big nothing. one of my mod colleagues got doxxed and had a banned user ringing at his very physical door demanding "to discuss the issue", how would you feel about it ? edit: and this is a boring country sub, I can't even imagine what modding a political sub is like.

shmatt 3y ago

except you don't need to be born a chosen one to become a mod. its not rocket science, and plenty of people want the power have you every thought to yourself, wow, /r/pics is so much better since /u/DM_ME_BOOGERS joined the mod team, I really feel like there was a pre-2019 /r/pics and a post-2019 /r/pics People don't even notice that mod teams could have completely rotated out this year and they didn't feel a thing edit: ill add an example, /u/Cyxie up until a couple years ago, moderated 20% of the top 500 subreddits, their user is now deleted Has anyone felt reddit is worse these days since they left? Is the day they left widely known as the day Reddit became bad? Heres your answer: no one cares about Cyxie, Reddit was fine before them, during their tenure, and after they deleted their account

ilyt 3y ago
Pretty much, people only notice when mod team decides to make significant changes to how subreddit works (banning certain types of posts etc.), not the power-hungry individual at hand
sudhirkhanger 3y ago
You can pretty much leave communities in auto mode and nothing will happen. A few posts will get blocked. A few people will get annoyed. It is both difficult to encourage and discourage people to participate in Reddit communities.
foolfoolz 3y ago
there’s always more people who want to mod. mods don’t own the content. i would expect reddit to have a rule saying if a reddit has over 1,000 posts it can’t go private. there’s already a ton of mod power and they can make money by keeping clearly paid content active
thesh4d0w 3y ago
R/pics isn't exactly an example of a high quality subreddit. Try the same thing on a subject domain specific sub, where the mods actively police the quality of comments. Askscience for example.
- 3y ago

seydor 3y ago

> its army of unpaid moderators This meme has been a bit overdone. I think this protest shows another angle: Reddit has been providing moderators a place to feel special and superior for free, and they are now addicted to it. Look, reddit is opening the door and tells them to leave but the vast majority DONT and won't leave. This is revealing who is dependent on whom.