11 ms·

/u/spez is right about feudalism and that's why Reddit is doomed

145 points by earthboundkid 3y ago

cheaprentalyeti 3y ago
I briefly skimmed and they started talking about manorial systems and vassalage. I think we tend to shoot ourselves in the foot with definitions and whatnot whenever we try to talk about Feudalism, especially when we concentrate on the dark ages and the middle ages and the lack of a functioning state. My suspicion is: Feudalism didn't start with manorialism in the dark ages. It started with the predecessor systems to vassalage in the Roman Empire, when there was a very functioning state with a system of vassalage and hierarchy already in place and roots going back to the pre-Empire times of the Republic. It was made worse by Diocletian and noone after Diocletian was either willing or able to fix things.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  yes and.. you are looking at the top.. nice views! but the mass of people, their entire lives, were not at the top. Serfs, peasants, vassels, indentured servants , slave markets -- look there, at the labor force, and compare the herding of cattle to no-rights people, for comparison to intelligent, able, digital serfs.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
    << digital serfs. There is a difference. 'No-rights' people were corralled and restrained, by force when necessary. Where is the violence today? At best, there is a threat that you will lose your job ( it is not insignificant, but it is not your life ). Can reddit put you in acid mines? No. Can they fire you? Well, the mods there are volunteers. Their status indicates how quickly they could pick up and their toys and move. There is only one thing that makes them digital serfs. Inertia. ( yes, I am aware how difficult it is to have a website these days that scales, but the only thing that is really stopping people from doing things is that doing things is hard; it is easier to do what you did yesterday )
    - mistrial9 3y ago
      the nature of the fences and punishment, have changed.. agree
    - olddustytrail 3y ago
      I'm pretty sure there's no such thing as an "acid mine"?
      - A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
        My secondary joke reference is asbestos factory ( also technically not existing, but the concept is the same -- highly dangerous environment ). Obviously, I exaggerated a little bit.
      - bee_rider 3y ago
        Based on their other comment they are just using it as an exaggeration. But it did make me interested enough to look it up. Apparently there are some inorganic solid acids, they look to mostly be oxides, I have no idea if they exist in high enough concentrations to be mined. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_acid https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_acid
- paganel 3y ago
  > Feudalism didn't start with manorialism in the dark ages. There is a hint of that in the excellent Histoire de la France rurale (History of Rural France), in the first [1] of the three volumes. As far as I remember by the late 200s - going into the 300s present-day Île-de-France was littered with Roman villas which were, in effect, very similar to the future manors. Any one of those villas was headed by the pater familias, followed by his close relatives and by the villa's dependents, who dependants nowadays someone might call "serfs" and "oppressed" (like the author of the article does when talking about the dependants of the féodalité), but who were, most probably, neither of that (meaning they were not real serfs/slaves and they were not that oppressed). For those interested, Roger Agache [2] has done an excellent job of documenting the existence on the ground of those villas/manors based on aerial archeology. This page [3] does a good job at presenting some of Agache's work (including some photos), the French Ministry of Culture used to have a page dedicated to aerial archeology but, unfortunately, I now see that it has been taken down. [1] https://www.seuil.com/ouvrage/histoire-de-la-france-rurale-collectif/9782757873779 https://www.seuil.com/ouvrage/histoire-de-la-france-rurale-c... [2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Agache https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Agache [3] http://sehet.andre.free.fr/dedetextes/photosrogeragache.htm http://sehet.andre.free.fr/dedetextes/photosrogeragache.htm
  - cheaprentalyeti 3y ago
    In France they might have been called villas, but in most of the rest of the Roman world they were called latifundia. (But I didn't come back to do more "Um, Achtually" about Feudalism. I found the links, now where should I put them?)
    - shakow 3y ago
      They were called villa in latin. The latifundium was the whole domain, whereas the villa was the owning family main living building.
- karpierz 3y ago
  It's worth reading in a little more detail. One of the core points is that "Feudalism" as used outside of academic discussion loses its semantic meaning beyond being a synonym for "oppressive". And so trying to discuss when feudalism starts inevitably falls into a discussion of "when did Europe get oppressive".
  - superkuh 3y ago
    I don't think so. In the context of tech feudalism maps really well. People cannot protect their own forums/communities running on their own hardware from attack and/or futureshock from rapid change in underlying libs. So everyone depends on single entities with enough resources to keep community software running.
    - cheaprentalyeti 3y ago
      My suggestion: use the term "Patron/Client" instead of feudalism and you'll be able to see/show all the cruddy political effects without having to map everything in Techbroland to the legalities of grazing sheep.
    - lolinder 3y ago
      The argument isn't that "feudalism" maps poorly onto modern concepts, it's that "feudalism" is a modern concept that doesn't exist as such historically. It seems to map well onto modern forms of oppression because the word is essentially synonymous with oppressive behavior.
  - lo_zamoyski 3y ago
    It's a lazy pejorative, like "fascist".
- lo_zamoyski 3y ago
  I would avoid the use of the term "Dark Ages". It has always been a loaded term (popular with those who had or have an ax to grind against the Church, like Protestants and Enlightenment propagandists) and characterizes our own ignorance better than the time period itself. The Renaissance itself is better understood as a development of the Middle Ages. The continuity and interplay of cultural currents during the Middle Ages/Renaissance are far more interesting than the simplistic, boring, and tendentious presentation we're often taught in school (Middle Ages = bad, backwards, ignorant; Renaissance = good, progressive, enlightened). For example, while empirical science saw a development during the Renaissance, it depended on prior intellectual of the Scholastic period, itself marked by a good deal of philosophical rigor, for lack of a better term (a rigor unjustly mocked by Protestants, surviving to this day in expressions involving the number of angels on the head of a pin). Whatever the merits of the Renaissance and faults of the Middle Ages, philosophically, the Renaissance falls short of the Middle Ages.
  - MrStonedOne 3y ago
    [dead]
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    The Dark Ages is called that because it refers to the power vacuum left behind in the wake of the Western Roman Empire's fall. The regional power that maintained law and order was no more and it was now every man for himself. Economies and cultures can't flourish and will recede when everyone is busy murdering and backstabbing each other, thus called the Dark Ages. It wasn't until Charlemagne united most of Gaul and created the Frankish Kingdom that some semblance of peace was restored, ushering in the Middle Ages and the return of economic growth and cultural development. As an aside, everything I read and was taught about the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, and the Renaissance back in my day was deeply intriguing and rich in wisdom and knowledge. It saddens me greatly if it's all been whitewashed down to "Dark Ages wrongspeak, Early Middle Ages rightspeak" and "Middle Ages backwards, Renaissance forwards" today because that is so grossly worthless.
    - giraffe_lady 3y ago
cheaprentalyeti 3y ago
[flagged]
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  I struggle to see the link between the drama at Reddit and what you’re discussing. I don’t think I agree it’s a dominant issue for Twitter either, although Elon has attempted to frame it as such.
  - mandmandam 3y ago
    Thinking about it, there may actually be a strong link. Reddit spent the last few years badgering mods into "combating misinformation". A war against an 'enemy' is an 'easy' way to get people in line. For example, the science sub banned people for linking an official EU recommendation against more than 4 vaccines, or for questioning the natural origin theory. That's not science; it's antithetical to science. Repeat this at scale, over millions of users, tens of thousands of subs, thousands of links, hundreds of concepts, over years; all powered and amplified by LLM powered bots and shadowy PR teams. Complicit mods, those who didn't give much of a toss about free speech or independent thought, were selected for and elevated during this process. Meanwhile, users and moderators who didn't like the idea of censoring alternate and legitimate viewpoints have been leaving / shadowbanned / marginalized for the past couple years. Would the resistance of Reddit users and mods have been stronger without the above circumstances? I think it actually made a huge difference. Reddit today is far worse than Reddit 4 years ago. Reddit tomorrow will be exponentially worse again, I have no doubt. The Corona "misinformation war" has been a large factor in that.
    - cheaprentalyeti 3y ago
      You don't need to control the moderators to control the moderators. You need to control the moderators to control the readership at large.
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      I doubt even 1% of mods felt that was relevant their subreddits
bborud 3y ago
[flagged]
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
I’d be interested to see where if at all the economic incentives in these systems reflect previous political systems (like feudalism) - my guess is that this is where the metaphors break down. For example there was a tangible consumable result of sharecropping - food that you eat. Youtube is the same sharecropping system, you get a small percentage of the product you produce (advertising revenue) for the organization (YouTube) who provide the property that you use. For a feudalism - Reddit comparison, where is the economic compensation? Answer: there isn’t any that is facilitated by the platform. So this can’t be compared as it’s a different economic system. I’ve heard it argued that some moderators are getting paid or whatever but I’ve seen no evidence of this and as a moderator and founder of 100,000 person Sub, that is very popular fora small community, at no point have we been approached as the moderator team by Reddit or otherwise, to be compensated for our work. Reddit uses 100% volunteer work and the entirety of the Reddit content moderation structure is Volunteer on top of a strict corporate hierarchy. I’m not actually sure we have a name for that in political theory (anyone have any ideas?) I appreciate the differentiation here - even if there’s limited expected application for the layperson using the phrase colloquially in an Internet forum.
- xwdv 3y ago
  As a mod don’t you earn a lot of karma or gold?
  - birdyrooster 3y ago
    Is there a market for converting karma or gold into fiat without breaking terms of service?
  - OnlyLys 3y ago
    I don't know about karma or gold, but I earned a few death threats as a subreddit moderator. Now that was truly rewarding.
    - a2tech 3y ago
      Crazy. I post under my real name on reddit and I'm a moderator for our local community. I've never gotten any sort of real threat, but its concerning that it ever happens since I'm so easily found in reality.
jongjong 3y ago
There cannot be feudalism without the narrative of an omnipotent god to justify class inequality. There needs to be a strong narrative to justify why some people get free stuff and others don't.
- _dain_ 3y ago
  buddhist countries had feudalism
  - joeythedolphin 3y ago
    ouch for jongjong's argument
  - samstave 3y ago
    Just look at what the "buddhists" are doing in Myanmar
  - jongjong 3y ago
    Ok. I stand corrected about a god specifically but I stand by the idea that there needs to be a strong supernatural narrative. If there is no god, there needs to be some kind of future reward for accepting a low rank in current society. Buddhism provides a nirvana/afterlife narrative to justify why people should accept/embrace suffering in the current life so it serves the same purpose as a god.
    - _dain_ 3y ago
      gulags were invented by a country professing state atheism
      - jongjong 3y ago
        There is still the promise of potentially being freed after some time and most people who were there believed to some extent that they deserved to be punished for being a bad communist. If the class difference is big, the narrative to justify the difference must be strong; even under serfdom or slavery, there were uprisings when the narrative was weak. The lowest class has to be (to some degree) content with their situation.
throw_m239339 3y ago
I despise u_spez but he is cunning. Not only he has a deep knowledge and understanding of reddit moderators (he can easily read all their chat and DM after all), but he quelled their rebellion not even by threatening them with a ban, but simply giving moderation rights to somebody else and the large sub moderators immediately caved at the perspective of losing the power the wield.
- theaussiestew 3y ago
  It’s kind of comical how easily this revolt got quashed.
- oblio 3y ago
  He has a team, you know?
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
> "Large landholders rely on the desperation of the little people to make it possible for them to secure enough borrowed/bought/forced labor to make those larger holdings produce." This is like half the startups since 2000's, like Amazon warehouse workers and Deliveroo. Just instead of physical land, their holding are IP, but equally violently protected by the state. Feudalism lasted for thousands of years, it should be surprising to see bits of it re-emerge
amelius 3y ago
The endgame of an unregulated market is multiple markets which are now regulated by companies (platform owners).
leashless 3y ago
For the people making a living off YouTube it's a lot clearer how the power relations work
tiffanyg 3y ago
Right or not, /u/spez* really needs to stop relying so strongly on the 'techniques' of the "Marie Antoinette" School of PR**. * AKA "Steve Antoinette" ** Yes, Antoinette was, really, particularly unfairly maligned and the enduring "PR failure" around her is a more complex and "apocryphal" case-study - but, whether understood this way or in the common vernacular sense, the point holds. See, e.g. and as a starting point: https://guides.loc.gov/women-in-the-french-revolution/marie-antoinette https://guides.loc.gov/women-in-the-french-revolution/marie-...
- Projectiboga 3y ago
  Thank you!
seydor 3y ago
this is so rambling that i didnt get to the point where they explain why reddit is doomed. I dont think reddit is doomed, they just need to reign in the moderators and their ban lists, and enable some competition between subreddits (right now it's almost impossible to find alternative subs even if with search)
- dgreensp 3y ago
  The point ends up being that, even though moderators who built communities with their own two hands understandably feel an ownership of their subreddit, it’s all just rows in the database of Reddit the company, who is almost certainly going to make things more uniform and try to be more like TikTok (dooming “Reddit as we know it”). He doesn’t side with Steve or find Steve’s statement to be historically informed, but there are some similarities (and differences) to note if you compare moderators to lords and Reddit/Steve to a king.
- icegreentea2 3y ago
  The article's point wasn't that Reddit is doomed, it's that Reddit as we knew it (with strong distinctions between sub-reddits) is doomed. The article basically says "let's play along and say Reddit is like feudalism - then what comes next is early Modern Governments" ie - centralization of power towards absolute centers of power. The article argues that Reddit currently employs moderators because the heterogeneity (ie, strong distinctions of subreddits) are not generally amendable to local control. In order for Reddit to transition to strong centralization that heterogeneity needs to be reduced and managed (in a form similar to how TikTok serves up content in a way that minimizes the ability of 'communities' with heterogeneous norms to form).
c_crank 3y ago
[flagged]
diebeforei485 3y ago
People like the prestige, power, and ability to shape the conversation.
- Maxion 3y ago
  I'm not so sold on that idea, a lot of subreddits were built with love and care. Not sociopathy, apathy, and sadism. Subreddits where the moderators often behave against the overall wishes of the community usually don't end well.
RockyMcNuts 3y ago
If moderators are feudal 'landed gentry' then what does that make 'spez'? What does it make owners of platforms who decide with more or less absolute authority what is acceptable on their platforms? As software platforms 'eat the world?' <cough>Elon "The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters."</cough> https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/elon-musk-woke-mind-virus/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/elon-musk-woke-mind-virus/
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  It makes Spez the King, that is obvious. The landed gentry were trying to lead a popular rebellion against the King, so the King reminded the commoners that the landed gentry are not their democratic representatives. This doesn't mean the King is suggesting himself to be democratic, of course he isn't and he wouldn't agree to an election for himself. But since the mods claim to be representatives of the commoners in a popular uprising, they framed themselves as democratically legitimate and in doing so, set themselves up to be threatened with elections they know they wouldn't win.
- indymike 3y ago
  The mods aren’t even the nobles… they are just serfs with skills like the village miller or blacksmith.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    A mod is characterized by their power to moderate. They may also have useful trades, they might also be content creators or blacksmiths who hammer iron, but that isn't what makes them a mod. What makes them a mod is the authority and power, given to them by the King, to strike down any commoner they please.
mcpackieh 3y ago
Calling the reddit mods landed gentry was a stroke of genius. Perfectly calibrated to get under the mods' skin and piss them off, while at the same time driving a wedge between them and the various commoners who already had innumerable personal grudges against the mods. It undermined the perceived legitimacy of the mods and provoked the mods to react emotionally at the same time, making the mods play the victim while simultaneously reminding the commoners who the real victims of the system really were.
- PhasmaFelis 3y ago
  I doubt there were many people who didn't already hate the mods who were swayed by an unelected dictator gabbling about the importance of democracy.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    The point was to remind the moderators that they aren't the democratic leaders representing the will of users as they framed themselves to be. Some mods are well liked but a great many of them are widely hated and know they would lose elections. Nobody mistakes the King for a democratic leader, even when he threatens the mods with elections. Nobody thinks even for an instant that Spez might let his users vote him out, Spez knows it too. He isn't pretending to be democratic, he's making an overt power play by proposing elections for those under him but not himself.
    - worrycue 3y ago
      I wouldn't say mods are unelected. Readers basically vote by visiting the subreddit they mod. If a bunch of mods become too much of a problem, you can just "leave the country". If enough people leave, those mods will just be dictators of an empty subreddit.
      - tomohelix 3y ago
        You can't "leave the country" for the large default subs. That kind of argument doesn't scale well into the millions+ subs where even if every mods on that board being a dick to 2-3 people a day, they would still need years to make the current population of user to get noticeably affected. And because they are basically the default subs, their new users make up for whoever is leaving anyway. The mods for those big subs are literally untouchable and can do whatever they want, with no accountability.
mola 3y ago
If mods are the landed gentry, then he is the autocratic king....
- red_trumpet 3y ago
  Yeah, that's the point the article makes. My personal favorite is the response to Steve saying > And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic. which is: > While I am willing to get hype about the general idea of property inheritance being so anti-democratic in nature that a democratic society must expropriate that property to function, I am guessing Steve Huffman, estimated net worth in the millions Steve Huffman, is not too married to what that implies, and really intends only to speak of inherited authority.
eggbrain 3y ago
I’ve been thinking similarly[0] about the community ownership/moderation problem[1] and have come to a similar conclusion that I think the next “reddit” will need to move away from moderators and fiefdoms if it wishes to succeed. When the moderation team is great the community flourishes, but too often communities are not well run, and badly led communities eventually crush a platform’s success. - [0] https://www.scottgoci.com/killing-the-king-why-do-communities-need-moderators/ https://www.scottgoci.com/killing-the-king-why-do-communitie... - [1] https://www.scottgoci.com/from-pioneers-to-landed-gentry-exploring-the-community-ownership-conundrum/ https://www.scottgoci.com/from-pioneers-to-landed-gentry-exp...
- pixl97 3y ago
  In general the idea of "just use filters" fails. Number one, messages cost money for someone somewhere. Allowing everything and just filtering out bullshit leads to untold amounts of bullshit you have to filter. Hence the point of moderators in the first place... This feeds into point two. Most people don't want to play moderator and create huge lists of filters in order to not deal with shit. They will gladly farm that off to someone else even if there are considerable potential negative side effects, and if it gets too bad they will pack up and move to a new community with less negative effects.
  - eggbrain 3y ago
    > Most people don't want to play moderator and create huge lists of filters in order to not deal with shit. Sure — but think of Ad block filters. Filter lists eventually get developed (eg Easylist), and if the maintainers ever do something radical, users can easily remove one filter list and substitute another. It’s much harder for users in communities with moderators to do the same — if I get banned from /r/detroit and I live there, what’s my alternative?
dan-robertson 3y ago
I only skimmed the article so I don’t have anything to say about the broader point. But, $3.4m/yr seems like a shockingly low valuation for the amount of work moderators are providing Reddit for free. That would, I think, be a pretty small fraction of how much they pay for engineering, for example. If Reddit could just pay moderators that money, it seems to me to be an obviously good deal. But I mostly suspect the number is a pretty big underestimate and Reddit couldn’t just do that.
mananaysiempre 3y ago
> [Reddit] relies on a vast amount of unpaid volunteer moderation labor – $3.4 million’s worth a year, by one estimate. I’ve noticed the link to a member-only Medium article[1] that serves as a source for that estimate, but I have to ask—is that a vast amount? It doesn’t feel like a vast amount. It’s at most 30 first-world full-time employees (and even that is a huge stretch) or 4e-3 $/MAU/yr (per a 2021 estimate of 900M monthly active users I picked from search results at random). It feels too small to even pay for the maintenance of the third-party mod tools, let alone the actual (far more numerous) moderators. Does this number seem plausible to anyone with actual domain knowledge? [1] https://clivethompson.medium.com/reddit-moderators-do-over-3-4-million-in-free-labor-every-year-d3571235c32c https://clivethompson.medium.com/reddit-moderators-do-over-3...
- c_crank 3y ago
  [flagged]
- kixiQu 3y ago
  https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/19318/19090 https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/19318/1909... Here's the study with methodology and whatnot. I agree it seems a bit low
- danaris 3y ago
  Your idea of what a "first-world employee" makes is extremely optimistic.
  - beebmam 3y ago
    Costs of employment is higher than just wages paid.
    - redeux 3y ago
      Roughly 30% higher when you account for benefits and taxes. This is a significant number for SMBs but insignificant for for a hyper scale tech company.
bentcorner 3y ago
I think the comparisons to TikTok are quite apt, and I think there's a further conclusion that is missing from this essay. Long term /u/spez wants to get rid of subreddits, but he needs to do it in a boiling-the-frog kind of way, otherwise the community would revolt even further. But it's the right way to go from his perspective. In retrospect subreddits were a mistake, allowing individual communities to form in isolation, requiring mods who understood the nuances of each of those communities. /u/spez wants to figure out how to kill subreddits without actually killing them. My guess is that subreddits will transition over to a hashtag concept. At first, posts will only be allowed to have one hashtag (so it maps to how reddit works today), eventually they will have many. This will kill sub moderation. All that's left is killing old.reddit.com, he can do that by just gimping the thing and breaking it. Nothing explicitly malicious but just stop putting engineering effort into it and eventually it falls apart. This makes sure all users use "new reddit". In the new client you won't be able to view subreddits - you will have tag search but it will never be as feature rich as just scrolling the home page. I have no idea if reddit can compete with tiktok but at this point that's where they'll be. Maybe they hitch on to the "tiktok is stealing your data" wagon and brand themselves as the American Tiktok that is Lawful and Is Not Evil, which can probably get them decently far.
- robotshmobot 3y ago
  The lack of imagination at these large social media companies is astounding. Everything seems driven by finance departments.
- BoxFour 3y ago
  Naturally, if they transform into TikTok one might wonder why they persist in visiting Reddit instead of simply just going to TikTok.
  - Apocryphon 3y ago
    It’s absolutely mad that they can see Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. all experiment with TikTok-type stories and video shorts, fail to be much of anything than a vector for resharing TikToks, and think that Reddit can somehow do it better.
627467 3y ago
At first glance I don't see reddit's mods role much different from Twitter community notes contributor or even a wikipedia editor. On the other end of the spectrum you have paid content mods at alphabet or meta. Yeah, wikipedia is a non-profit and arguably provides a more universal value: so what? Each model has pros and cons, for the org and for society. I'm not sure if one is always better than the other in any context. But one thing is clear: the unpaid model invariably leads to an authority-centered model where power over other participants is the payment token. That's how it's been in wikipedia and reddit. It seems in their new war, reddit want to wrestle that power back to them.
kazinator 3y ago
Feudalism is such an oversimplification that through its lens, Japanese feudalism looks exactly like European feudalism. :)

145 points by earthboundkid 3y ago

I briefly skimmed and they started talking about manorial systems and vassalage. I think we tend to shoot ourselves in the foot with definitions and whatnot whenever we try to talk about Feudalism, especially when we concentrate on the dark ages and the middle ages and the lack of a functioning state. My suspicion is: Feudalism didn't start with manorialism in the dark ages. It started with the predecessor systems to vassalage in the Roman Empire, when there was a very functioning state with a system of vassalage and hierarchy already in place and roots going back to the pre-Empire times of the Republic. It was made worse by Diocletian and noone after Diocletian was either willing or able to fix things.

mistrial9 3y ago
yes and.. you are looking at the top.. nice views! but the mass of people, their entire lives, were not at the top. Serfs, peasants, vassels, indentured servants , slave markets -- look there, at the labor force, and compare the herding of cattle to no-rights people, for comparison to intelligent, able, digital serfs.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
  << digital serfs. There is a difference. 'No-rights' people were corralled and restrained, by force when necessary. Where is the violence today? At best, there is a threat that you will lose your job ( it is not insignificant, but it is not your life ). Can reddit put you in acid mines? No. Can they fire you? Well, the mods there are volunteers. Their status indicates how quickly they could pick up and their toys and move. There is only one thing that makes them digital serfs. Inertia. ( yes, I am aware how difficult it is to have a website these days that scales, but the only thing that is really stopping people from doing things is that doing things is hard; it is easier to do what you did yesterday )
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    the nature of the fences and punishment, have changed.. agree
  - olddustytrail 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure there's no such thing as an "acid mine"?
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
      My secondary joke reference is asbestos factory ( also technically not existing, but the concept is the same -- highly dangerous environment ). Obviously, I exaggerated a little bit.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      Based on their other comment they are just using it as an exaggeration. But it did make me interested enough to look it up. Apparently there are some inorganic solid acids, they look to mostly be oxides, I have no idea if they exist in high enough concentrations to be mined. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_acid https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_acid
paganel 3y ago
> Feudalism didn't start with manorialism in the dark ages. There is a hint of that in the excellent Histoire de la France rurale (History of Rural France), in the first [1] of the three volumes. As far as I remember by the late 200s - going into the 300s present-day Île-de-France was littered with Roman villas which were, in effect, very similar to the future manors. Any one of those villas was headed by the pater familias, followed by his close relatives and by the villa's dependents, who dependants nowadays someone might call "serfs" and "oppressed" (like the author of the article does when talking about the dependants of the féodalité), but who were, most probably, neither of that (meaning they were not real serfs/slaves and they were not that oppressed). For those interested, Roger Agache [2] has done an excellent job of documenting the existence on the ground of those villas/manors based on aerial archeology. This page [3] does a good job at presenting some of Agache's work (including some photos), the French Ministry of Culture used to have a page dedicated to aerial archeology but, unfortunately, I now see that it has been taken down. [1] https://www.seuil.com/ouvrage/histoire-de-la-france-rurale-collectif/9782757873779 https://www.seuil.com/ouvrage/histoire-de-la-france-rurale-c... [2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Agache https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Agache [3] http://sehet.andre.free.fr/dedetextes/photosrogeragache.htm http://sehet.andre.free.fr/dedetextes/photosrogeragache.htm
- cheaprentalyeti 3y ago
  In France they might have been called villas, but in most of the rest of the Roman world they were called latifundia. (But I didn't come back to do more "Um, Achtually" about Feudalism. I found the links, now where should I put them?)
  - shakow 3y ago
    They were called villa in latin. The latifundium was the whole domain, whereas the villa was the owning family main living building.
karpierz 3y ago
It's worth reading in a little more detail. One of the core points is that "Feudalism" as used outside of academic discussion loses its semantic meaning beyond being a synonym for "oppressive". And so trying to discuss when feudalism starts inevitably falls into a discussion of "when did Europe get oppressive".
- superkuh 3y ago
  I don't think so. In the context of tech feudalism maps really well. People cannot protect their own forums/communities running on their own hardware from attack and/or futureshock from rapid change in underlying libs. So everyone depends on single entities with enough resources to keep community software running.
  - cheaprentalyeti 3y ago
    My suggestion: use the term "Patron/Client" instead of feudalism and you'll be able to see/show all the cruddy political effects without having to map everything in Techbroland to the legalities of grazing sheep.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    The argument isn't that "feudalism" maps poorly onto modern concepts, it's that "feudalism" is a modern concept that doesn't exist as such historically. It seems to map well onto modern forms of oppression because the word is essentially synonymous with oppressive behavior.
- lo_zamoyski 3y ago
  It's a lazy pejorative, like "fascist".
lo_zamoyski 3y ago
I would avoid the use of the term "Dark Ages". It has always been a loaded term (popular with those who had or have an ax to grind against the Church, like Protestants and Enlightenment propagandists) and characterizes our own ignorance better than the time period itself. The Renaissance itself is better understood as a development of the Middle Ages. The continuity and interplay of cultural currents during the Middle Ages/Renaissance are far more interesting than the simplistic, boring, and tendentious presentation we're often taught in school (Middle Ages = bad, backwards, ignorant; Renaissance = good, progressive, enlightened). For example, while empirical science saw a development during the Renaissance, it depended on prior intellectual of the Scholastic period, itself marked by a good deal of philosophical rigor, for lack of a better term (a rigor unjustly mocked by Protestants, surviving to this day in expressions involving the number of angels on the head of a pin). Whatever the merits of the Renaissance and faults of the Middle Ages, philosophically, the Renaissance falls short of the Middle Ages.
- MrStonedOne 3y ago
  [dead]
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  The Dark Ages is called that because it refers to the power vacuum left behind in the wake of the Western Roman Empire's fall. The regional power that maintained law and order was no more and it was now every man for himself. Economies and cultures can't flourish and will recede when everyone is busy murdering and backstabbing each other, thus called the Dark Ages. It wasn't until Charlemagne united most of Gaul and created the Frankish Kingdom that some semblance of peace was restored, ushering in the Middle Ages and the return of economic growth and cultural development. As an aside, everything I read and was taught about the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, and the Renaissance back in my day was deeply intriguing and rich in wisdom and knowledge. It saddens me greatly if it's all been whitewashed down to "Dark Ages wrongspeak, Early Middle Ages rightspeak" and "Middle Ages backwards, Renaissance forwards" today because that is so grossly worthless.
  - giraffe_lady 3y ago

cheaprentalyeti 3y ago

[flagged]

jncfhnb 3y ago
I struggle to see the link between the drama at Reddit and what you’re discussing. I don’t think I agree it’s a dominant issue for Twitter either, although Elon has attempted to frame it as such.
- mandmandam 3y ago
  Thinking about it, there may actually be a strong link. Reddit spent the last few years badgering mods into "combating misinformation". A war against an 'enemy' is an 'easy' way to get people in line. For example, the science sub banned people for linking an official EU recommendation against more than 4 vaccines, or for questioning the natural origin theory. That's not science; it's antithetical to science. Repeat this at scale, over millions of users, tens of thousands of subs, thousands of links, hundreds of concepts, over years; all powered and amplified by LLM powered bots and shadowy PR teams. Complicit mods, those who didn't give much of a toss about free speech or independent thought, were selected for and elevated during this process. Meanwhile, users and moderators who didn't like the idea of censoring alternate and legitimate viewpoints have been leaving / shadowbanned / marginalized for the past couple years. Would the resistance of Reddit users and mods have been stronger without the above circumstances? I think it actually made a huge difference. Reddit today is far worse than Reddit 4 years ago. Reddit tomorrow will be exponentially worse again, I have no doubt. The Corona "misinformation war" has been a large factor in that.
  - cheaprentalyeti 3y ago
    You don't need to control the moderators to control the moderators. You need to control the moderators to control the readership at large.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    I doubt even 1% of mods felt that was relevant their subreddits

bborud 3y ago

[flagged]

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

I’d be interested to see where if at all the economic incentives in these systems reflect previous political systems (like feudalism) - my guess is that this is where the metaphors break down. For example there was a tangible consumable result of sharecropping - food that you eat. Youtube is the same sharecropping system, you get a small percentage of the product you produce (advertising revenue) for the organization (YouTube) who provide the property that you use. For a feudalism - Reddit comparison, where is the economic compensation? Answer: there isn’t any that is facilitated by the platform. So this can’t be compared as it’s a different economic system. I’ve heard it argued that some moderators are getting paid or whatever but I’ve seen no evidence of this and as a moderator and founder of 100,000 person Sub, that is very popular fora small community, at no point have we been approached as the moderator team by Reddit or otherwise, to be compensated for our work. Reddit uses 100% volunteer work and the entirety of the Reddit content moderation structure is Volunteer on top of a strict corporate hierarchy. I’m not actually sure we have a name for that in political theory (anyone have any ideas?) I appreciate the differentiation here - even if there’s limited expected application for the layperson using the phrase colloquially in an Internet forum.

xwdv 3y ago
As a mod don’t you earn a lot of karma or gold?
- birdyrooster 3y ago
  Is there a market for converting karma or gold into fiat without breaking terms of service?
- OnlyLys 3y ago
  I don't know about karma or gold, but I earned a few death threats as a subreddit moderator. Now that was truly rewarding.
  - a2tech 3y ago
    Crazy. I post under my real name on reddit and I'm a moderator for our local community. I've never gotten any sort of real threat, but its concerning that it ever happens since I'm so easily found in reality.

jongjong 3y ago

There cannot be feudalism without the narrative of an omnipotent god to justify class inequality. There needs to be a strong narrative to justify why some people get free stuff and others don't.

_dain_ 3y ago
buddhist countries had feudalism
- joeythedolphin 3y ago
  ouch for jongjong's argument
- samstave 3y ago
  Just look at what the "buddhists" are doing in Myanmar
- jongjong 3y ago
  Ok. I stand corrected about a god specifically but I stand by the idea that there needs to be a strong supernatural narrative. If there is no god, there needs to be some kind of future reward for accepting a low rank in current society. Buddhism provides a nirvana/afterlife narrative to justify why people should accept/embrace suffering in the current life so it serves the same purpose as a god.
  - _dain_ 3y ago
    gulags were invented by a country professing state atheism
    - jongjong 3y ago
      There is still the promise of potentially being freed after some time and most people who were there believed to some extent that they deserved to be punished for being a bad communist. If the class difference is big, the narrative to justify the difference must be strong; even under serfdom or slavery, there were uprisings when the narrative was weak. The lowest class has to be (to some degree) content with their situation.

throw_m239339 3y ago

I despise u_spez but he is cunning. Not only he has a deep knowledge and understanding of reddit moderators (he can easily read all their chat and DM after all), but he quelled their rebellion not even by threatening them with a ban, but simply giving moderation rights to somebody else and the large sub moderators immediately caved at the perspective of losing the power the wield.

theaussiestew 3y ago
It’s kind of comical how easily this revolt got quashed.
oblio 3y ago
He has a team, you know?

ClumsyPilot 3y ago

> "Large landholders rely on the desperation of the little people to make it possible for them to secure enough borrowed/bought/forced labor to make those larger holdings produce." This is like half the startups since 2000's, like Amazon warehouse workers and Deliveroo. Just instead of physical land, their holding are IP, but equally violently protected by the state. Feudalism lasted for thousands of years, it should be surprising to see bits of it re-emerge

amelius 3y ago

The endgame of an unregulated market is multiple markets which are now regulated by companies (platform owners).

leashless 3y ago

For the people making a living off YouTube it's a lot clearer how the power relations work

tiffanyg 3y ago

Right or not, /u/spez* really needs to stop relying so strongly on the 'techniques' of the "Marie Antoinette" School of PR**. * AKA "Steve Antoinette" ** Yes, Antoinette was, really, particularly unfairly maligned and the enduring "PR failure" around her is a more complex and "apocryphal" case-study - but, whether understood this way or in the common vernacular sense, the point holds. See, e.g. and as a starting point: https://guides.loc.gov/women-in-the-french-revolution/marie-antoinette https://guides.loc.gov/women-in-the-french-revolution/marie-...

Projectiboga 3y ago
Thank you!

seydor 3y ago

this is so rambling that i didnt get to the point where they explain why reddit is doomed. I dont think reddit is doomed, they just need to reign in the moderators and their ban lists, and enable some competition between subreddits (right now it's almost impossible to find alternative subs even if with search)

dgreensp 3y ago
The point ends up being that, even though moderators who built communities with their own two hands understandably feel an ownership of their subreddit, it’s all just rows in the database of Reddit the company, who is almost certainly going to make things more uniform and try to be more like TikTok (dooming “Reddit as we know it”). He doesn’t side with Steve or find Steve’s statement to be historically informed, but there are some similarities (and differences) to note if you compare moderators to lords and Reddit/Steve to a king.
icegreentea2 3y ago
The article's point wasn't that Reddit is doomed, it's that Reddit as we knew it (with strong distinctions between sub-reddits) is doomed. The article basically says "let's play along and say Reddit is like feudalism - then what comes next is early Modern Governments" ie - centralization of power towards absolute centers of power. The article argues that Reddit currently employs moderators because the heterogeneity (ie, strong distinctions of subreddits) are not generally amendable to local control. In order for Reddit to transition to strong centralization that heterogeneity needs to be reduced and managed (in a form similar to how TikTok serves up content in a way that minimizes the ability of 'communities' with heterogeneous norms to form).

c_crank 3y ago

[flagged]

diebeforei485 3y ago

People like the prestige, power, and ability to shape the conversation.

Maxion 3y ago
I'm not so sold on that idea, a lot of subreddits were built with love and care. Not sociopathy, apathy, and sadism. Subreddits where the moderators often behave against the overall wishes of the community usually don't end well.

RockyMcNuts 3y ago

If moderators are feudal 'landed gentry' then what does that make 'spez'? What does it make owners of platforms who decide with more or less absolute authority what is acceptable on their platforms? As software platforms 'eat the world?' <cough>Elon "The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters."</cough> https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/elon-musk-woke-mind-virus/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/elon-musk-woke-mind-virus/

mcpackieh 3y ago
It makes Spez the King, that is obvious. The landed gentry were trying to lead a popular rebellion against the King, so the King reminded the commoners that the landed gentry are not their democratic representatives. This doesn't mean the King is suggesting himself to be democratic, of course he isn't and he wouldn't agree to an election for himself. But since the mods claim to be representatives of the commoners in a popular uprising, they framed themselves as democratically legitimate and in doing so, set themselves up to be threatened with elections they know they wouldn't win.
indymike 3y ago
The mods aren’t even the nobles… they are just serfs with skills like the village miller or blacksmith.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  A mod is characterized by their power to moderate. They may also have useful trades, they might also be content creators or blacksmiths who hammer iron, but that isn't what makes them a mod. What makes them a mod is the authority and power, given to them by the King, to strike down any commoner they please.

mcpackieh 3y ago

Calling the reddit mods landed gentry was a stroke of genius. Perfectly calibrated to get under the mods' skin and piss them off, while at the same time driving a wedge between them and the various commoners who already had innumerable personal grudges against the mods. It undermined the perceived legitimacy of the mods and provoked the mods to react emotionally at the same time, making the mods play the victim while simultaneously reminding the commoners who the real victims of the system really were.

PhasmaFelis 3y ago
I doubt there were many people who didn't already hate the mods who were swayed by an unelected dictator gabbling about the importance of democracy.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  The point was to remind the moderators that they aren't the democratic leaders representing the will of users as they framed themselves to be. Some mods are well liked but a great many of them are widely hated and know they would lose elections. Nobody mistakes the King for a democratic leader, even when he threatens the mods with elections. Nobody thinks even for an instant that Spez might let his users vote him out, Spez knows it too. He isn't pretending to be democratic, he's making an overt power play by proposing elections for those under him but not himself.
  - worrycue 3y ago
    I wouldn't say mods are unelected. Readers basically vote by visiting the subreddit they mod. If a bunch of mods become too much of a problem, you can just "leave the country". If enough people leave, those mods will just be dictators of an empty subreddit.
    - tomohelix 3y ago
      You can't "leave the country" for the large default subs. That kind of argument doesn't scale well into the millions+ subs where even if every mods on that board being a dick to 2-3 people a day, they would still need years to make the current population of user to get noticeably affected. And because they are basically the default subs, their new users make up for whoever is leaving anyway. The mods for those big subs are literally untouchable and can do whatever they want, with no accountability.

mola 3y ago

If mods are the landed gentry, then he is the autocratic king....

red_trumpet 3y ago
Yeah, that's the point the article makes. My personal favorite is the response to Steve saying > And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic. which is: > While I am willing to get hype about the general idea of property inheritance being so anti-democratic in nature that a democratic society must expropriate that property to function, I am guessing Steve Huffman, estimated net worth in the millions Steve Huffman, is not too married to what that implies, and really intends only to speak of inherited authority.

eggbrain 3y ago

I’ve been thinking similarly[0] about the community ownership/moderation problem[1] and have come to a similar conclusion that I think the next “reddit” will need to move away from moderators and fiefdoms if it wishes to succeed. When the moderation team is great the community flourishes, but too often communities are not well run, and badly led communities eventually crush a platform’s success. - [0] https://www.scottgoci.com/killing-the-king-why-do-communities-need-moderators/ https://www.scottgoci.com/killing-the-king-why-do-communitie... - [1] https://www.scottgoci.com/from-pioneers-to-landed-gentry-exploring-the-community-ownership-conundrum/ https://www.scottgoci.com/from-pioneers-to-landed-gentry-exp...

pixl97 3y ago
In general the idea of "just use filters" fails. Number one, messages cost money for someone somewhere. Allowing everything and just filtering out bullshit leads to untold amounts of bullshit you have to filter. Hence the point of moderators in the first place... This feeds into point two. Most people don't want to play moderator and create huge lists of filters in order to not deal with shit. They will gladly farm that off to someone else even if there are considerable potential negative side effects, and if it gets too bad they will pack up and move to a new community with less negative effects.
- eggbrain 3y ago
  > Most people don't want to play moderator and create huge lists of filters in order to not deal with shit. Sure — but think of Ad block filters. Filter lists eventually get developed (eg Easylist), and if the maintainers ever do something radical, users can easily remove one filter list and substitute another. It’s much harder for users in communities with moderators to do the same — if I get banned from /r/detroit and I live there, what’s my alternative?

dan-robertson 3y ago

I only skimmed the article so I don’t have anything to say about the broader point. But, $3.4m/yr seems like a shockingly low valuation for the amount of work moderators are providing Reddit for free. That would, I think, be a pretty small fraction of how much they pay for engineering, for example. If Reddit could just pay moderators that money, it seems to me to be an obviously good deal. But I mostly suspect the number is a pretty big underestimate and Reddit couldn’t just do that.

mananaysiempre 3y ago

> [Reddit] relies on a vast amount of unpaid volunteer moderation labor – $3.4 million’s worth a year, by one estimate. I’ve noticed the link to a member-only Medium article[1] that serves as a source for that estimate, but I have to ask—is that a vast amount? It doesn’t feel like a vast amount. It’s at most 30 first-world full-time employees (and even that is a huge stretch) or 4e-3 $/MAU/yr (per a 2021 estimate of 900M monthly active users I picked from search results at random). It feels too small to even pay for the maintenance of the third-party mod tools, let alone the actual (far more numerous) moderators. Does this number seem plausible to anyone with actual domain knowledge? [1] https://clivethompson.medium.com/reddit-moderators-do-over-3-4-million-in-free-labor-every-year-d3571235c32c https://clivethompson.medium.com/reddit-moderators-do-over-3...

c_crank 3y ago
[flagged]
kixiQu 3y ago
https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/19318/19090 https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/19318/1909... Here's the study with methodology and whatnot. I agree it seems a bit low
danaris 3y ago
Your idea of what a "first-world employee" makes is extremely optimistic.
- beebmam 3y ago
  Costs of employment is higher than just wages paid.
  - redeux 3y ago
    Roughly 30% higher when you account for benefits and taxes. This is a significant number for SMBs but insignificant for for a hyper scale tech company.

bentcorner 3y ago

I think the comparisons to TikTok are quite apt, and I think there's a further conclusion that is missing from this essay. Long term /u/spez wants to get rid of subreddits, but he needs to do it in a boiling-the-frog kind of way, otherwise the community would revolt even further. But it's the right way to go from his perspective. In retrospect subreddits were a mistake, allowing individual communities to form in isolation, requiring mods who understood the nuances of each of those communities. /u/spez wants to figure out how to kill subreddits without actually killing them. My guess is that subreddits will transition over to a hashtag concept. At first, posts will only be allowed to have one hashtag (so it maps to how reddit works today), eventually they will have many. This will kill sub moderation. All that's left is killing old.reddit.com, he can do that by just gimping the thing and breaking it. Nothing explicitly malicious but just stop putting engineering effort into it and eventually it falls apart. This makes sure all users use "new reddit". In the new client you won't be able to view subreddits - you will have tag search but it will never be as feature rich as just scrolling the home page. I have no idea if reddit can compete with tiktok but at this point that's where they'll be. Maybe they hitch on to the "tiktok is stealing your data" wagon and brand themselves as the American Tiktok that is Lawful and Is Not Evil, which can probably get them decently far.

robotshmobot 3y ago
The lack of imagination at these large social media companies is astounding. Everything seems driven by finance departments.
BoxFour 3y ago
Naturally, if they transform into TikTok one might wonder why they persist in visiting Reddit instead of simply just going to TikTok.
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  It’s absolutely mad that they can see Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. all experiment with TikTok-type stories and video shorts, fail to be much of anything than a vector for resharing TikToks, and think that Reddit can somehow do it better.

627467 3y ago

At first glance I don't see reddit's mods role much different from Twitter community notes contributor or even a wikipedia editor. On the other end of the spectrum you have paid content mods at alphabet or meta. Yeah, wikipedia is a non-profit and arguably provides a more universal value: so what? Each model has pros and cons, for the org and for society. I'm not sure if one is always better than the other in any context. But one thing is clear: the unpaid model invariably leads to an authority-centered model where power over other participants is the payment token. That's how it's been in wikipedia and reddit. It seems in their new war, reddit want to wrestle that power back to them.

kazinator 3y ago

Feudalism is such an oversimplification that through its lens, Japanese feudalism looks exactly like European feudalism. :)