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It's interesting seeing this situation play out across different subreddits. There seems to be 2 kinds of subreddits - the "category" kind (simple, descriptive

It's interesting seeing this situation play out across different subreddits. There seems to be 2 kinds of subreddits - the "category" kind (simple, descriptive name) and the "community" kind (have a defined purpose, could exist under a whole range of names) The moderators of all of them see themselves as somehow owning the community, but I think that's less clear to the users. To most users, r/Celebrities is a category of posts about celebrities. They don't really care who moderates it. It's a similar situation for things like region/city specific subreddits. The users don't really care about the culture, they just want someone to delete the spam. When the moderators start shutting it down, or threatening to move the community elsewhere, the users mostly end up thinking "who elected you anyway?" The community subreddits are different - they often have a much more defined culture and purpose. Those are the ones which, if the moderators give up, will die. It seems like Reddit is betting that most subreddits are the category kind - and they're probably right. But the community subreddits are likely to be lost.

veave 3y ago
>The community subreddits are different - they often have a much more defined culture and purpose. Those are the ones which, if the moderators give up, will die. I am in some "community" subreddits and moderators are just there to enforce the rules that they made up and not everybody necessarily agree with. As an example, it's very common to have vague rules that silence some flavour of on-topic conversations... and then they are arbitrarily enforced, depending on whether the mod likes or dislikes where the conversation is going. In my opinion, if mods from small subs were gone, that would be a huge positive. I'm glad that this abusive relationship of mods who think they own the entire community (including the users) and treat it as their fiefdom is coming to an end. Just the fact that they are shutting down entire communities shows the level of entitlement they have over the community they moderate. Doing a lot of unpaid labour doesn't entitle you to anything, but it does indeed show the kind of person that you are.
- oblio 3y ago
  Some of the smaller communities only exist because someone created and promoted them, set ground rules, etc. In the olden days the subreddit would be their personal PHPBB forum. Now they are just sharecroppers for Reddit, and guess what, Reddit isn't a better admin.
  - veave 3y ago
    Most of the smaller communities only exist because someone was first to take the subreddit name, period. That doesn't say anything about the quality of their mods. And as I said most mods are power tripping and/or want to control the conversation. I am glad that they are getting removed for the good of the community.
    - leoedin 3y ago
      Yeah, it's not nearly as clear cut as someone running their own forum. It's almost irrelevant that someone happened to register /r/politics or r/worldnews first - those are categories of discussion, and so their size is directly proportional to Reddit's size. The moderators don't own that community (even if they think they do). If the moderators declare that they're moving to Lemmy, let them. I think they'll quickly realise that people aren't on those subreddits because of them. There's a real frustration when you join a new subreddit, and you think you're joining a category of discussion and quickly discover (by having a post removed) that this particular category has someone who enforces a huge list of arcane rules. Obviously there are exceptions. Some subreddits have non-obvious names, and were built into focused communities by the efforts of the moderators. But not all subreddits are equal, and I think this situation has revealed the gulf between them.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        >this particular category has someone who enforces a huge list of arcane rules. and I think a few months with new eyes will show why those arcane rules exist. Losing that tribal knowledge just means the sub will re-experience the same growing pains until we come full circle back to the rules we deemed arcane. Tech moves fast. Human nature, not so much. social media is a lot more about the latter.
yanderekko 3y ago
I'd distinguish between small and large communities. For example, if the World of Warcraft subreddit implodes somehow it's basically guaranteed that another one will arise, although you do often get awkward userbase splits, eg. /r/gameofthrones vs. /r/freefolk. I'd say that basically any community with 100k members will continue onwards from a mod implosion. For smaller communities (<10k members), it's probable that reformation would not happen in a clear way if a founding mod destroyed it, unless the community is booming. For communities in the 10k-100k range, I could see things going either way.
- antupis 3y ago
  I think we will see effects in long run, if I would start new community 2016 I would have definitely picked Reddit now it is probably Discord or Slack.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    Slack?
- TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
  There are also a plethora of Middle-earth communities, and they have very different feels. /r/tolkienfans is not at all the same as /r/silmarillionmemes.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I think you need to inflate your numbers these days. 100k back in the time admins stepped in for r/wow isn't 100k today. I'd say the bar is more around 500k, with 300-500k being the uncertain range. I definitely can think of some 100-300k communities that will be irrevocably damaged if they tried to split (usually ones focused on specific genres, or subs focused on personalities or series). I can't think of any sub <100k that would survive in this decade if ruptured.
HlessClaudesman 3y ago
I don't think ownership is the right descriptor for how most mods feel about "their" subreddit. I would hazard a guess that most mods feel more like stakeholders, having already done a large amount of unpaid labour should entitle them to have some say over the future direction of that subreddit.
- nkrisc 3y ago
  Perhaps, but they should check what their contact says.
- frankfrankfrank 3y ago
  So because they did things voluntarily they are owed something? You describe the very mentality that is persistent among all corrosive human efforts that go by many different labels, but all share a common element of imposing demands through violation, i.e., “we freely agree on one thing, now you demand another under threat of violence.”
  - jjk166 3y ago
    Yes, people who do labor are owed things. If you don't want to owe someone for their labor, do it yourself.
  - faeriechangling 3y ago
    The status quo is if you don’t moderate for a month somebody can challenge you as moderator and take over. People who took over communities in this way, and now cannot be displaced because of their activity, literally are moderators because they did something voluntarily. That’s just on the admin level, mod to mod, generally users who are active and willing to do the work are more likely to be promoted to mod and less likely to be kicked from the mods. But in short, yes your willingness to do unpaid labor is absolutely part of what entitles you to be a mod. It’s not always sufficient but it’s often required.
xattt 3y ago
You’re right that no mod owns a particular subreddit, but Reddit does not have a monopoly on communities either. There are a bunch of forums online which will gladly accept an influx of refugees from reddit, and the world will move on. If there isn’t one, one will form, somewhere. However, past behaviour also predicts future behaviour. The current actions of board of directors (and the silence of others) speaks volumes. Reddit may go as far as salting the earth for communities that do end up successfully migrating. I wouldn’t put it past them to hire a troll farm to spam a niche community with low-quality content. It’s been a nice break away from Reddit.
- firesteelrain 3y ago
  The alternatives are crap right now and they might move on but unless the masses jump onto Lemmy or Mastodon, Reddit will continue to dominate. I tried those two other sites and they are just terrible.
  - criddell 3y ago
    Do you really want an alternative? Everybody is different, but for me, the return on my time spent there was way too low. Rarely when I closed the window did I feel good about how I spent the previous 20-30 minutes. And I say that as someone with a very low bar for when time is well spent. Like John Lennon, I believe that time you enjoy wasting isn’t wasted. Reddit wasn’t clearing that bar for me. It felt like a slot machine. There was some compulsion to pull the handle again but ultimately I walked away less happy.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      I do. Reddit - specifically old.reddit.com - is the pinnacle of discussion board UIs (which is less of a commendation of Reddit, and more a damnation of every other platform, especially those that came after). And quality-wise, it's what you make of it - it's not a single site, it's a universe of mostly independent discussion boards, connected by SSO and a shared interaction model. Whether you spend time on Reddit's equivalent of HN or of 9gag, that's up to you - both exist, and it's not fair to condemn one because of the other. (Slot machine mechanics are, unfortunately, present to a degree in every discussion board, group chat and mailing list - other people posting potentially interesting content == variable-schedule reward, which is the way to get addicted fast.)
WeylandYutani 3y ago
I think mods are power tripping and starting to think they are the owners of Reddit.
bgro 3y ago
reddit has some of the worst mods I’ve ever seen in any capacity. And they’re frequently in control of massive subreddits. I remember when hate speech was just discovered as a reason to ban people, and mods of major subreddits would find ways to use that either out of protest or complete incompetence to ban people. For example, banning users for disagreeing with a controversial decision because “I hate your take, thus it is hate speech.” Or the constant other entitled drama like when a soccer subreddit started mass banning people discussing a major game because his team lost. There’s also just constant nuking of entire threads and locking them with no reason other than a blanket accusatory pinned comment about how “everybody” can’t behave. Nothing better than opening a thread about a picture they took of their dog only to find thousands of deleted comments and a temper tantrum post from some mod. Or multiple pinned spam posts from mods advertising junk in like a 5000 character copy paste spam in every post that just adds to the useless scrolling you have to do to see legitimate content.
- chris_wot 3y ago
  The r/Australia mods are awful
  - jq-r 3y ago
    I bet a lot of r/SomeCountry subreddits are cesspits of bad moderation and/or nationalism and other *isms.
  - firecall 3y ago
    I hate to use this word, but the entire subreddit is juvenile. Try making a comment that maybe all Boomers arnt property owning rent seeking monsters… Or having a nuanced debate around how renting out your property on AirBNB doesn’t make you responsible for the destruction of society… The entire sub is overrun by zealots with an overly simplistic view of the world. Still, they are doing news.com a massive favour by seemingly giving them endless material to reuse without credit! Being banned from Reddit in 2023 is a blessing. I still hang out on Aussie forums, notably OCAU which is still going strong!
- starttoaster 3y ago
johnnyanmac 3y ago
>The users don't really care about the culture, they just want someone to delete the spam for larger subs, I think users underestimate how much trouble it is to do that job. And Reddit hasn't made it easier for mods to do that. On the contrary, this move will make it more time consuming to delete spam.
- viraptor 3y ago
  It's also misunderstanding of what culture/spam really is. Outside of the actual automated link spam which is obvious, it's an extremely fuzzy area with very subjective rules. What you delete as spam defines the culture.
  - notnaut 3y ago
    /r/conservative is a shining example of moderators defining the culture of their subreddit by deleting comments and posts with an extremely heavy hand.
  - kelipso 3y ago
    What one person defines as curating for culture, another person defines as oppressive censorship. Subjective of course, how much freedom do you want in a big sub vs some niche sub, etc.
detourdog 3y ago
It's interesting observation. The early days of the web everyone owned their own websites. Services like tripod and later weblogs changed that dynamic.
gonehome 3y ago
Getting rid of mods like the one linked in this post is a net positive for Reddit imo. His plan was to disable the subreddit for 6 weeks while working on a bot? What? Reddit can just take over. Mods like this are awful - way too much power has gone to their head just because they happened to be the first to create some subreddit.
- viraptor 3y ago
  > Reddit can just take over. Can it? How many people with moderation experience can they find right now who can take over the larger subreddits? How many will be ok with doing it for free in this situation? We'll see how well will the reopened communities work given the loss of the good mod tools.
  - michaelt 3y ago
    > How many people with moderation experience can they find right now who can take over the larger subreddits? There are a bunch of companies in low-cost-of-living countries who provide moderation services out of call-centre-like facilities. They also provide ML human labelling services. They won't be providing thoughtful, nuanced guidance to guide the growth of the community - but if you just want to keep beheading videos and female nipples off the front page, there are companies that can provide the workforce faster than you can code the integration.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
taylodl 3y ago
People suck, especially Reddit moderators. They've been destroying communities for years. Honestly, the best thing Reddit could do is figure out how to shake these people off like a bad case of fleas. Maybe that is what they're doing? You're 100% right - people want communities where the posts are largely relevant. Has AI advanced enough to make AI moderation possible? Can upvoting/downvoting posts help train an AI what a community values and what it doesn't? That's where I think things are eventually headed.
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  Yeah there’s a lot of problems with the moderation system, essentially pure seniority with appointments.

veave 3y ago

>The community subreddits are different - they often have a much more defined culture and purpose. Those are the ones which, if the moderators give up, will die. I am in some "community" subreddits and moderators are just there to enforce the rules that they made up and not everybody necessarily agree with. As an example, it's very common to have vague rules that silence some flavour of on-topic conversations... and then they are arbitrarily enforced, depending on whether the mod likes or dislikes where the conversation is going. In my opinion, if mods from small subs were gone, that would be a huge positive. I'm glad that this abusive relationship of mods who think they own the entire community (including the users) and treat it as their fiefdom is coming to an end. Just the fact that they are shutting down entire communities shows the level of entitlement they have over the community they moderate. Doing a lot of unpaid labour doesn't entitle you to anything, but it does indeed show the kind of person that you are.

oblio 3y ago
Some of the smaller communities only exist because someone created and promoted them, set ground rules, etc. In the olden days the subreddit would be their personal PHPBB forum. Now they are just sharecroppers for Reddit, and guess what, Reddit isn't a better admin.
- veave 3y ago
  Most of the smaller communities only exist because someone was first to take the subreddit name, period. That doesn't say anything about the quality of their mods. And as I said most mods are power tripping and/or want to control the conversation. I am glad that they are getting removed for the good of the community.
  - leoedin 3y ago
    Yeah, it's not nearly as clear cut as someone running their own forum. It's almost irrelevant that someone happened to register /r/politics or r/worldnews first - those are categories of discussion, and so their size is directly proportional to Reddit's size. The moderators don't own that community (even if they think they do). If the moderators declare that they're moving to Lemmy, let them. I think they'll quickly realise that people aren't on those subreddits because of them. There's a real frustration when you join a new subreddit, and you think you're joining a category of discussion and quickly discover (by having a post removed) that this particular category has someone who enforces a huge list of arcane rules. Obviously there are exceptions. Some subreddits have non-obvious names, and were built into focused communities by the efforts of the moderators. But not all subreddits are equal, and I think this situation has revealed the gulf between them.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      >this particular category has someone who enforces a huge list of arcane rules. and I think a few months with new eyes will show why those arcane rules exist. Losing that tribal knowledge just means the sub will re-experience the same growing pains until we come full circle back to the rules we deemed arcane. Tech moves fast. Human nature, not so much. social media is a lot more about the latter.

yanderekko 3y ago

I'd distinguish between small and large communities. For example, if the World of Warcraft subreddit implodes somehow it's basically guaranteed that another one will arise, although you do often get awkward userbase splits, eg. /r/gameofthrones vs. /r/freefolk. I'd say that basically any community with 100k members will continue onwards from a mod implosion. For smaller communities (<10k members), it's probable that reformation would not happen in a clear way if a founding mod destroyed it, unless the community is booming. For communities in the 10k-100k range, I could see things going either way.

antupis 3y ago
I think we will see effects in long run, if I would start new community 2016 I would have definitely picked Reddit now it is probably Discord or Slack.
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  Slack?
TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
There are also a plethora of Middle-earth communities, and they have very different feels. /r/tolkienfans is not at all the same as /r/silmarillionmemes.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
I think you need to inflate your numbers these days. 100k back in the time admins stepped in for r/wow isn't 100k today. I'd say the bar is more around 500k, with 300-500k being the uncertain range. I definitely can think of some 100-300k communities that will be irrevocably damaged if they tried to split (usually ones focused on specific genres, or subs focused on personalities or series). I can't think of any sub <100k that would survive in this decade if ruptured.

HlessClaudesman 3y ago

I don't think ownership is the right descriptor for how most mods feel about "their" subreddit. I would hazard a guess that most mods feel more like stakeholders, having already done a large amount of unpaid labour should entitle them to have some say over the future direction of that subreddit.

nkrisc 3y ago
Perhaps, but they should check what their contact says.
frankfrankfrank 3y ago
So because they did things voluntarily they are owed something? You describe the very mentality that is persistent among all corrosive human efforts that go by many different labels, but all share a common element of imposing demands through violation, i.e., “we freely agree on one thing, now you demand another under threat of violence.”
- jjk166 3y ago
  Yes, people who do labor are owed things. If you don't want to owe someone for their labor, do it yourself.
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  The status quo is if you don’t moderate for a month somebody can challenge you as moderator and take over. People who took over communities in this way, and now cannot be displaced because of their activity, literally are moderators because they did something voluntarily. That’s just on the admin level, mod to mod, generally users who are active and willing to do the work are more likely to be promoted to mod and less likely to be kicked from the mods. But in short, yes your willingness to do unpaid labor is absolutely part of what entitles you to be a mod. It’s not always sufficient but it’s often required.

xattt 3y ago

You’re right that no mod owns a particular subreddit, but Reddit does not have a monopoly on communities either. There are a bunch of forums online which will gladly accept an influx of refugees from reddit, and the world will move on. If there isn’t one, one will form, somewhere. However, past behaviour also predicts future behaviour. The current actions of board of directors (and the silence of others) speaks volumes. Reddit may go as far as salting the earth for communities that do end up successfully migrating. I wouldn’t put it past them to hire a troll farm to spam a niche community with low-quality content. It’s been a nice break away from Reddit.

firesteelrain 3y ago
The alternatives are crap right now and they might move on but unless the masses jump onto Lemmy or Mastodon, Reddit will continue to dominate. I tried those two other sites and they are just terrible.
- criddell 3y ago
  Do you really want an alternative? Everybody is different, but for me, the return on my time spent there was way too low. Rarely when I closed the window did I feel good about how I spent the previous 20-30 minutes. And I say that as someone with a very low bar for when time is well spent. Like John Lennon, I believe that time you enjoy wasting isn’t wasted. Reddit wasn’t clearing that bar for me. It felt like a slot machine. There was some compulsion to pull the handle again but ultimately I walked away less happy.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    I do. Reddit - specifically old.reddit.com - is the pinnacle of discussion board UIs (which is less of a commendation of Reddit, and more a damnation of every other platform, especially those that came after). And quality-wise, it's what you make of it - it's not a single site, it's a universe of mostly independent discussion boards, connected by SSO and a shared interaction model. Whether you spend time on Reddit's equivalent of HN or of 9gag, that's up to you - both exist, and it's not fair to condemn one because of the other. (Slot machine mechanics are, unfortunately, present to a degree in every discussion board, group chat and mailing list - other people posting potentially interesting content == variable-schedule reward, which is the way to get addicted fast.)

WeylandYutani 3y ago

I think mods are power tripping and starting to think they are the owners of Reddit.

bgro 3y ago

reddit has some of the worst mods I’ve ever seen in any capacity. And they’re frequently in control of massive subreddits. I remember when hate speech was just discovered as a reason to ban people, and mods of major subreddits would find ways to use that either out of protest or complete incompetence to ban people. For example, banning users for disagreeing with a controversial decision because “I hate your take, thus it is hate speech.” Or the constant other entitled drama like when a soccer subreddit started mass banning people discussing a major game because his team lost. There’s also just constant nuking of entire threads and locking them with no reason other than a blanket accusatory pinned comment about how “everybody” can’t behave. Nothing better than opening a thread about a picture they took of their dog only to find thousands of deleted comments and a temper tantrum post from some mod. Or multiple pinned spam posts from mods advertising junk in like a 5000 character copy paste spam in every post that just adds to the useless scrolling you have to do to see legitimate content.

chris_wot 3y ago
The r/Australia mods are awful
- jq-r 3y ago
  I bet a lot of r/SomeCountry subreddits are cesspits of bad moderation and/or nationalism and other *isms.
- firecall 3y ago
  I hate to use this word, but the entire subreddit is juvenile. Try making a comment that maybe all Boomers arnt property owning rent seeking monsters… Or having a nuanced debate around how renting out your property on AirBNB doesn’t make you responsible for the destruction of society… The entire sub is overrun by zealots with an overly simplistic view of the world. Still, they are doing news.com a massive favour by seemingly giving them endless material to reuse without credit! Being banned from Reddit in 2023 is a blessing. I still hang out on Aussie forums, notably OCAU which is still going strong!
starttoaster 3y ago

johnnyanmac 3y ago

>The users don't really care about the culture, they just want someone to delete the spam for larger subs, I think users underestimate how much trouble it is to do that job. And Reddit hasn't made it easier for mods to do that. On the contrary, this move will make it more time consuming to delete spam.

viraptor 3y ago
It's also misunderstanding of what culture/spam really is. Outside of the actual automated link spam which is obvious, it's an extremely fuzzy area with very subjective rules. What you delete as spam defines the culture.
- notnaut 3y ago
  /r/conservative is a shining example of moderators defining the culture of their subreddit by deleting comments and posts with an extremely heavy hand.
- kelipso 3y ago
  What one person defines as curating for culture, another person defines as oppressive censorship. Subjective of course, how much freedom do you want in a big sub vs some niche sub, etc.

detourdog 3y ago

It's interesting observation. The early days of the web everyone owned their own websites. Services like tripod and later weblogs changed that dynamic.

gonehome 3y ago

Getting rid of mods like the one linked in this post is a net positive for Reddit imo. His plan was to disable the subreddit for 6 weeks while working on a bot? What? Reddit can just take over. Mods like this are awful - way too much power has gone to their head just because they happened to be the first to create some subreddit.

viraptor 3y ago
> Reddit can just take over. Can it? How many people with moderation experience can they find right now who can take over the larger subreddits? How many will be ok with doing it for free in this situation? We'll see how well will the reopened communities work given the loss of the good mod tools.
- michaelt 3y ago
  > How many people with moderation experience can they find right now who can take over the larger subreddits? There are a bunch of companies in low-cost-of-living countries who provide moderation services out of call-centre-like facilities. They also provide ML human labelling services. They won't be providing thoughtful, nuanced guidance to guide the growth of the community - but if you just want to keep beheading videos and female nipples off the front page, there are companies that can provide the workforce faster than you can code the integration.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

taylodl 3y ago

People suck, especially Reddit moderators. They've been destroying communities for years. Honestly, the best thing Reddit could do is figure out how to shake these people off like a bad case of fleas. Maybe that is what they're doing? You're 100% right - people want communities where the posts are largely relevant. Has AI advanced enough to make AI moderation possible? Can upvoting/downvoting posts help train an AI what a community values and what it doesn't? That's where I think things are eventually headed.

faeriechangling 3y ago
Yeah there’s a lot of problems with the moderation system, essentially pure seniority with appointments.