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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

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.

procarch2019 3y ago
Just putting this out there because I guess I don’t know, but is it possible that most users don’t care *yet*. Isn’t it possible that the API changes could have a direct impact on the content or commenting?
- bhaak 3y ago
  From personal experience I can tell you that pushshift being cut off has impacted my ability to mod. I often looked up suspicious users and seeing what they wrote in other subreddits helped me decide if they were worth the risk of a second chance or if it was less of a hassle to ban them. Especially their deleted or removed comments were often quite enlightening. That's not something Reddit enabled me to do. I could have worked around it. I started archiving thematically similar subreddits myself but it is something that I gladly outsourced and have paid money for instead of doing it myself in an half assed way. And I am a programmer, so I can do such things. Lots of other mods aren't and can't do similar things. Expect lower quality modding (some people will LOL and ask 'even lower?') because of this changes. That I had to pay a 3rd party instead of Reddit is not the fault of the 3rd party. They provided a service that Reddit never did.
x86x87 3y ago
nah. there was always a way to remove crappy mods. reddit could and would step in at any point in time. don't mix "there are crappy mods out there" with "all mods are crappy". it's not even close. the reason reddit runs is because of all the unpaid mod labor. reddit should just fucking moderate all subs themselves and after that they can do whatever the fuck they want. what? that's expensive AF and comes with liability? what? you want to eat the cake and also keep the cake? that's cute!
- fullshark 3y ago
  They will step in eventually, and they are going to respond to this blackout with a new voting mechanism to replace mods it sounds like. Both seem sensible to me.
  - x86x87 3y ago
    To me it sounds like slipping into irrelevance but hey i quit reddit so i have 0 fucks left to give. Gonna grab the popcorn and watch from the side
  - bhaak 3y ago
    And how should that work? Unpaid mods have to do even more subreddit politics than they do already? How are the users supposed to gauge the work of mods? Most users don't even know the difference between a comment that was removed by the mods or by the user itself and blame it always on the mods, even though Reddit shows it with message (of course not in a clearly understandable way, this is Reddit after all with horrific UI and UX even though users have been complaining for years). As a mod I often pointed the users to pushshift to see what has been removed so they could see for themselves. Thank you Reddit for taking this clarification from us.
yosito 3y ago
Maybe for some definitions of "don't care" most users "don't care" about being forced to use a broken app with a terrible user experience. But I guarantee you almost every user would like to have a better UX than the official Reddit app offers.
- procarch2019 3y ago
  I still use the mobile site and am convinced that the piss poor design of that is dark patterns to get people to give up and use the app.
mintplant 3y ago
Mods give a subreddit its norms and structure. If you kick out the mod team and forcibly reopen r/subcultureX, you're not getting r/subcultureX back, you're getting something new puppeting around its skin. If users really just wanted to start talking about X again, nothing's stopping them from going and creating r/subcultureX2. You can't force people to continue donating the massive amounts of free labor that made these communities what they were.
- cragfar 3y ago
  There already is a function that gives a subreddit its norms and structure. It's the upvote and downvote tool. Mods should not be shaping a subreddit, that's not moderating.
  - bhaak 3y ago
    People only put up with so much bullshit. If you allow the annoying and loud trolls in your subreddit you alienate the more reasonable users that bring in quality content and worse case those quality content moves elsewhere. What I learned in the last years is that it's misleading that the down- and upvote button is enough. Especially as so many users use the downvote button as "I don't agree with this comment" instead of the intended "this does not belong on this subreddit" and no amount of educating the users help.

procarch2019 3y ago

Just putting this out there because I guess I don’t know, but is it possible that most users don’t care *yet*. Isn’t it possible that the API changes could have a direct impact on the content or commenting?

bhaak 3y ago
From personal experience I can tell you that pushshift being cut off has impacted my ability to mod. I often looked up suspicious users and seeing what they wrote in other subreddits helped me decide if they were worth the risk of a second chance or if it was less of a hassle to ban them. Especially their deleted or removed comments were often quite enlightening. That's not something Reddit enabled me to do. I could have worked around it. I started archiving thematically similar subreddits myself but it is something that I gladly outsourced and have paid money for instead of doing it myself in an half assed way. And I am a programmer, so I can do such things. Lots of other mods aren't and can't do similar things. Expect lower quality modding (some people will LOL and ask 'even lower?') because of this changes. That I had to pay a 3rd party instead of Reddit is not the fault of the 3rd party. They provided a service that Reddit never did.

x86x87 3y ago

nah. there was always a way to remove crappy mods. reddit could and would step in at any point in time. don't mix "there are crappy mods out there" with "all mods are crappy". it's not even close. the reason reddit runs is because of all the unpaid mod labor. reddit should just fucking moderate all subs themselves and after that they can do whatever the fuck they want. what? that's expensive AF and comes with liability? what? you want to eat the cake and also keep the cake? that's cute!

fullshark 3y ago
They will step in eventually, and they are going to respond to this blackout with a new voting mechanism to replace mods it sounds like. Both seem sensible to me.
- x86x87 3y ago
  To me it sounds like slipping into irrelevance but hey i quit reddit so i have 0 fucks left to give. Gonna grab the popcorn and watch from the side
- bhaak 3y ago
  And how should that work? Unpaid mods have to do even more subreddit politics than they do already? How are the users supposed to gauge the work of mods? Most users don't even know the difference between a comment that was removed by the mods or by the user itself and blame it always on the mods, even though Reddit shows it with message (of course not in a clearly understandable way, this is Reddit after all with horrific UI and UX even though users have been complaining for years). As a mod I often pointed the users to pushshift to see what has been removed so they could see for themselves. Thank you Reddit for taking this clarification from us.

yosito 3y ago

Maybe for some definitions of "don't care" most users "don't care" about being forced to use a broken app with a terrible user experience. But I guarantee you almost every user would like to have a better UX than the official Reddit app offers.

procarch2019 3y ago
I still use the mobile site and am convinced that the piss poor design of that is dark patterns to get people to give up and use the app.

mintplant 3y ago

Mods give a subreddit its norms and structure. If you kick out the mod team and forcibly reopen r/subcultureX, you're not getting r/subcultureX back, you're getting something new puppeting around its skin. If users really just wanted to start talking about X again, nothing's stopping them from going and creating r/subcultureX2. You can't force people to continue donating the massive amounts of free labor that made these communities what they were.

cragfar 3y ago
There already is a function that gives a subreddit its norms and structure. It's the upvote and downvote tool. Mods should not be shaping a subreddit, that's not moderating.
- bhaak 3y ago
  People only put up with so much bullshit. If you allow the annoying and loud trolls in your subreddit you alienate the more reasonable users that bring in quality content and worse case those quality content moves elsewhere. What I learned in the last years is that it's misleading that the down- and upvote button is enough. Especially as so many users use the downvote button as "I don't agree with this comment" instead of the intended "this does not belong on this subreddit" and no amount of educating the users help.