7 ms·

The thing is if the mods stopped modding the site will crumble and fast.

riffic 3y ago
moderation is effectively unpaid voluntary labor and the worst subreddit are the ones with absentee moderation. over moderation is just as bad too. the best moderation is human, engaged, and flexible.
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  >Unpaid you are doing it wrong. You 'curate' in favor of your advertisers. /r/eatcheapandhealthy has some relationship with Leanne Brown. They let that website's marketers astroturf + they link on the sidebar. On the bright side, HN doesn't hide that they have perverse incentives, they just pretend that astroturfing doesnt exist.
  - kelipso 3y ago
    Yeah, you have an audience primed for buying your product, plus the fairly gullible nature of your audience who tend to believe whatever is posted in the comments, it's ideal for advertisers and they're certainly taking advantage. But it doesn't look like reddit is benefiting from any of this. Contrast this to facebook, which has managed to squeeze money from advertisers under a somewhat similar setting.
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      > Yeah, you have an audience primed for buying your product, plus the fairly gullible nature of your audience who tend to believe whatever is posted in the comments, it's ideal for advertisers and they're certainly taking advantage. This is why I laugh when people say they include site:reddit.com in their web searches for product reviews. You may as well read amazon reviews; what you're seeing is very likely curated by somebody with a commercial interest in the thing. > But it doesn't look like reddit is benefiting from any of this. Contrast this to facebook, which has managed to squeeze money from advertisers under a somewhat similar setting. This has always been reddit's biggest problem; it's cheaper and more effective to astroturf or buy moderators than to buy ads from reddit. Companies that buy ads from reddit are chumps, they should be taking over subreddits instead. The rate of return is far superior.
      - paulmd 3y ago
        > This is why I laugh when people say they include site:reddit.com in their web searches for product reviews when SEO became gamed and the signal filtering was transferred to reddit, it became inevitable that eventually Reddit Optimization would occur for commerce as well. It's like trying to stomp down on sneakerheads scalping sneakers/GPUs/etc, or fighting hackers in an online game - you have to treat it as a process, not a victory that can be won with a single move, because everytime you make a move they're going to come up with a new strategy to get around it. What matters is that you keep coming up with counterstrategies for those.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- swader999 3y ago
  Yes, and so is the content creation with original posts, commenting and even just reading and deciding to like or upvote content. That is all labor that adds value and drives eyeballs in. The space seems ready for a model that pays everyone in the pipeline their true micro share of add and subscription revenue of what they contribute. I can't understand why something that does this hasn't taken over this space yet. There's crude versions of this with 'Karma', YouTube and twitch streaming revenue, substack, medium, brave rewards and so on. But nothing that just automatically works without sign up and a lot of friction.
  - fakedang 3y ago
    > The space seems ready for a model that pays everyone in the pipeline their true micro share of add and subscription revenue of what they contribute. I can't understand why something that does this hasn't taken over this space yet. Nobody cares about being paid for content when they're all willing to do it for free. When I post on reddit, I'm not doing it for compensation, but for upvotes. Reddit is just another mini-Google. What we need is a model that is redditesque but not VC funded. Just a small team maintaining something on the lines of old.reddit.com. And maybe a paid app like Apollo.
    - swader999 3y ago
      Sure, status does seem to reign. No reason why you can't have both. Many might choose to donate their earnings even.
      - fakedang 3y ago
        Exactly, if one is going by the number of badges that are paid for on reddit, even though they're not getting paid for it.
    - paulmd 3y ago
      > What we need is a model that is redditesque but not VC funded. Just a small team maintaining something on the lines of old.reddit.com. the problem is that reddit's scale provides value too. those alternatives exist, but nobody wants to post on them because a subreddit/forum with <5 regular commenters is boring and valueless. and the scale provides an endless stream of eyeballs, and low friction of clicking between subs and commenting on a new thing you haven't before (cf: the burden of figuring out 27 different lemmy instances). in terms of evolutionary advantage, going big is what keeps subs alive, and it's what keeps platforms alive. Someone who is willing to pay to start a centralized reddit 2.0 and establish the definitive r/vacuumcleaners is going to have a market advantage over 30 small lemmy nodes all trying to discuss vacuum cleaners. Especially in anything remotely niche - yeah everyone is discussing video games and politics, but, the really niche hobby interests don't have the user count to survive a 99.9% loss in users. another related problem is moderation policies: reddit provides a "one size fits all" moderation policy and then allows communities to go tighter, based on the whims of mods. But in the fediverse model, a lot of pods just won't federate with places that have different moderation policies. There just is a ton of that administrative superstructure that reddit provides that actually adds a lot of value too. And that has been the problem with a lot of the discourse around leaving reddit: the exact reasons Mastodon and Lemmy are having trouble getting traction are the value that Reddit provides in the relationship. People can't solve the problems they can't acknowledge. And then the mods pretty much pay lip service to user-generated value but then either ignore it or use it as a pawn (going against community votes to reopen, not allowing reopen as an option in the vote, etc) that makes it pretty clear they think they're the real value-add and that reddit would collapse without the dashing handsome moderator who spends 10 minutes scrolling the mod queue while squeezing the lemon on the shitter a couple times a day.
shitlord 3y ago
That's what mods have been saying the past few weeks, but somehow the site is working fine without them. It turns out that most of them don't add a lot of value and are easily replaceable.
- Capricorn2481 3y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean. Mods have not stopped moderating, it's just that some subs went private
  - shitlord 3y ago
    The subs that went private accomplished nothing and many were forced to reopen. Some mods were even deposed. Reddit will eventually find new mods to replace the ones still protesting, and business will continue as usual. After all, there's no shortage of people who want to lord over others. Moderation isn't some highly skilled activity that requires special qualifications.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      >Moderation isn't some highly skilled activity that requires special qualifications. Neither is cleaning up a beach. You may even get some willing to clean a small part, but having a few people spend exorbitant amounts of time cleaning a beach everyday that is also infested with sharks and crabs starts to turn a simple problem to a specialized one.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- 12345hn6789 3y ago
  Because little to no subs are unmoderated.
  - kuchenbecker 3y ago
    [flagged]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
paxys 3y ago
There are some great moderators on Reddit who are selflessly keeping their communities afloat. There are also those who are power hungry, routinely abuse their power, accept payments from corporations, and generally make the site a worse place. Mods of most popular/default subreddits more likely than not fall in the latter category.
- Gualdrapo 3y ago
  From all the drama that has happened in there, there were at least an upside - u/awkwardtheturtle, the mod behind the power trips at r/art (allegedly who took down posts from people who according to said mod were "ai generated art" but actually they weren't), was banned.
- dimmke 3y ago
  >There are also those who are power hungry, routinely abuse their power I see this argument all the time, but isn't this just human nature? In any organized structure, some people are going to seek out "power" and abuse it. You will find people making the same complaint about their neighbor who is the head of the homeowner association. It's also part of why people become cops, or if they can't get there, security guards. Every broad "type" of community on the internet has had this problem. I remember growing up, there were plenty of capricious IRC moderators and admins as well as moderators of individual forums. Little dictators. I will say, I feel like there was a concerted effort to frame these API changes as specifically being harmful to those with disabilities and moderators (I guess in an attempt to point to short term, immediate concrete harms that would come from this), which opened things up to reframing the whole discussion around as a referendum on moderation. And apparently most people can't make a simple connection and ask "Why did Reddit not care about these flagrant power abuses before? Will they keep caring after this is over?" And it seems like that's been fairly successful. But I still think Reddit has doomed itself with this move.
  - msla 3y ago
    Yes, it's human nature. The fact Reddit didn't allow bad moderators to be removed played into it, too, which resulted in some oddities of the website: /r/Marijuana was run by assholes, so /r/Trees became the marijuana subreddit. /r/WorldPolitics was run by moderators who didn't actually moderate the content (other than for the absolute "Sitewide Rules" the admins will remove a subreddit for violating) so it wound up with an absurd amount of cartoon porn, which lead to /r/Anime_Titties becoming the subreddit to discuss world politics. It's funny lore and it lead to the site having culture of a sort, but it points to a failure in upper-level administration. Reddit simply doesn't care about the product it's putting out, beyond some very basic rules aimed at trying to prevent the site itself from being sued, and it shows.
c_crank 3y ago
[flagged]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
oceanplexian 3y ago
Reddit would simply contract with some paid content moderators overseas, crank out automated moderation tools (With AI, this is easier than ever) and nothing would change. I worked at a fairly popular social media site about a decade ago and paid content moderation farms were a dime a dozen, I can’t even imagine what it’s like now.
- progfix 3y ago
  Paid mods will work for the big subreddits, but what about all the smaller ones. Will paid mods have the knowledge or passion to run a subreddit for a niche topic? To promote them or keep them interesting?
  - paulmd 3y ago
    those subs may wither but they're not a big revenue source or a big deal in the grand scheme of things. And if the current crop of users leave it doesn't mean nobody is interested in that topic anymore, so the odds are good that users will return in the future. If the mods are still gone at that point, there's abandoned-subreddit procedures that will be executed. And that's the part that mods are trying to exploit for griefing with the "it's not closed, we're just not letting anyone post"/"we're only letting people post unfunny memes in protest"/etc. I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you. Like it's just kind of funny that the mods are literally Going Galt and just like would happen in the real world, they're panicking with the realization that the world is pretty much going to move on without them.
- krainboltgreene 3y ago
  > With AI, this is easier than ever lolololololol, god i wish reddit would. that would be such an incredible fire.
scoofy 3y ago
I mean, I just disagree. I'm a mod on two large sub (bicycling and sanfrancisco) and a ton of the work is just done by automod and the users now days. The main point of contention would be on subs where the user base is divided in it's moderation desires, e.g., san francisco crime posts. Half the users think the city is just fine and the crime posts make them angry, the other half think the city is falling apart, and therefore think the issues is entirely relevant. In this type of situation, the obvious solution is to split the sub like Seattle/SeattleWA did, but both sides want control over the sub. These cultural control subs are the only ones that I think would "fall apart" without moderation, and even then I think the users would eventually self-select for separate subs. This whole issue has been bizarre, and I definitely did not have the passion about it that some mods do. Still, I think I'm growing weary of moderating, but I think it's mainly that I'm getting old.
- gremlinsinc 3y ago
  how many people who are mods also are top 20 percent of contributors on Reddit? what happens when they all leave the platform?
  - scoofy 3y ago
    Ehh, maybe, but I wouldn’t bet money on it. I think the biggest problem Huffman has is annoying the user base by shittifying the site for increased earnings. New reddit is god awful, and removing pleasant apps continues the trend. I’m still able to use the site with minimal bullshit, but I see the wave coming.

moderation is effectively unpaid voluntary labor and the worst subreddit are the ones with absentee moderation. over moderation is just as bad too. the best moderation is human, engaged, and flexible.

hospitalJail 3y ago
>Unpaid you are doing it wrong. You 'curate' in favor of your advertisers. /r/eatcheapandhealthy has some relationship with Leanne Brown. They let that website's marketers astroturf + they link on the sidebar. On the bright side, HN doesn't hide that they have perverse incentives, they just pretend that astroturfing doesnt exist.
- kelipso 3y ago
  Yeah, you have an audience primed for buying your product, plus the fairly gullible nature of your audience who tend to believe whatever is posted in the comments, it's ideal for advertisers and they're certainly taking advantage. But it doesn't look like reddit is benefiting from any of this. Contrast this to facebook, which has managed to squeeze money from advertisers under a somewhat similar setting.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    > Yeah, you have an audience primed for buying your product, plus the fairly gullible nature of your audience who tend to believe whatever is posted in the comments, it's ideal for advertisers and they're certainly taking advantage. This is why I laugh when people say they include site:reddit.com in their web searches for product reviews. You may as well read amazon reviews; what you're seeing is very likely curated by somebody with a commercial interest in the thing. > But it doesn't look like reddit is benefiting from any of this. Contrast this to facebook, which has managed to squeeze money from advertisers under a somewhat similar setting. This has always been reddit's biggest problem; it's cheaper and more effective to astroturf or buy moderators than to buy ads from reddit. Companies that buy ads from reddit are chumps, they should be taking over subreddits instead. The rate of return is far superior.
    - paulmd 3y ago
      > This is why I laugh when people say they include site:reddit.com in their web searches for product reviews when SEO became gamed and the signal filtering was transferred to reddit, it became inevitable that eventually Reddit Optimization would occur for commerce as well. It's like trying to stomp down on sneakerheads scalping sneakers/GPUs/etc, or fighting hackers in an online game - you have to treat it as a process, not a victory that can be won with a single move, because everytime you make a move they're going to come up with a new strategy to get around it. What matters is that you keep coming up with counterstrategies for those.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
swader999 3y ago
Yes, and so is the content creation with original posts, commenting and even just reading and deciding to like or upvote content. That is all labor that adds value and drives eyeballs in. The space seems ready for a model that pays everyone in the pipeline their true micro share of add and subscription revenue of what they contribute. I can't understand why something that does this hasn't taken over this space yet. There's crude versions of this with 'Karma', YouTube and twitch streaming revenue, substack, medium, brave rewards and so on. But nothing that just automatically works without sign up and a lot of friction.
- fakedang 3y ago
  > The space seems ready for a model that pays everyone in the pipeline their true micro share of add and subscription revenue of what they contribute. I can't understand why something that does this hasn't taken over this space yet. Nobody cares about being paid for content when they're all willing to do it for free. When I post on reddit, I'm not doing it for compensation, but for upvotes. Reddit is just another mini-Google. What we need is a model that is redditesque but not VC funded. Just a small team maintaining something on the lines of old.reddit.com. And maybe a paid app like Apollo.
  - swader999 3y ago
    Sure, status does seem to reign. No reason why you can't have both. Many might choose to donate their earnings even.
    - fakedang 3y ago
      Exactly, if one is going by the number of badges that are paid for on reddit, even though they're not getting paid for it.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    > What we need is a model that is redditesque but not VC funded. Just a small team maintaining something on the lines of old.reddit.com. the problem is that reddit's scale provides value too. those alternatives exist, but nobody wants to post on them because a subreddit/forum with <5 regular commenters is boring and valueless. and the scale provides an endless stream of eyeballs, and low friction of clicking between subs and commenting on a new thing you haven't before (cf: the burden of figuring out 27 different lemmy instances). in terms of evolutionary advantage, going big is what keeps subs alive, and it's what keeps platforms alive. Someone who is willing to pay to start a centralized reddit 2.0 and establish the definitive r/vacuumcleaners is going to have a market advantage over 30 small lemmy nodes all trying to discuss vacuum cleaners. Especially in anything remotely niche - yeah everyone is discussing video games and politics, but, the really niche hobby interests don't have the user count to survive a 99.9% loss in users. another related problem is moderation policies: reddit provides a "one size fits all" moderation policy and then allows communities to go tighter, based on the whims of mods. But in the fediverse model, a lot of pods just won't federate with places that have different moderation policies. There just is a ton of that administrative superstructure that reddit provides that actually adds a lot of value too. And that has been the problem with a lot of the discourse around leaving reddit: the exact reasons Mastodon and Lemmy are having trouble getting traction are the value that Reddit provides in the relationship. People can't solve the problems they can't acknowledge. And then the mods pretty much pay lip service to user-generated value but then either ignore it or use it as a pawn (going against community votes to reopen, not allowing reopen as an option in the vote, etc) that makes it pretty clear they think they're the real value-add and that reddit would collapse without the dashing handsome moderator who spends 10 minutes scrolling the mod queue while squeezing the lemon on the shitter a couple times a day.

shitlord 3y ago

That's what mods have been saying the past few weeks, but somehow the site is working fine without them. It turns out that most of them don't add a lot of value and are easily replaceable.

Capricorn2481 3y ago
I'm not sure what you mean. Mods have not stopped moderating, it's just that some subs went private
- shitlord 3y ago
  The subs that went private accomplished nothing and many were forced to reopen. Some mods were even deposed. Reddit will eventually find new mods to replace the ones still protesting, and business will continue as usual. After all, there's no shortage of people who want to lord over others. Moderation isn't some highly skilled activity that requires special qualifications.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >Moderation isn't some highly skilled activity that requires special qualifications. Neither is cleaning up a beach. You may even get some willing to clean a small part, but having a few people spend exorbitant amounts of time cleaning a beach everyday that is also infested with sharks and crabs starts to turn a simple problem to a specialized one.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
12345hn6789 3y ago
Because little to no subs are unmoderated.
- kuchenbecker 3y ago
  [flagged]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

paxys 3y ago

There are some great moderators on Reddit who are selflessly keeping their communities afloat. There are also those who are power hungry, routinely abuse their power, accept payments from corporations, and generally make the site a worse place. Mods of most popular/default subreddits more likely than not fall in the latter category.

Gualdrapo 3y ago
From all the drama that has happened in there, there were at least an upside - u/awkwardtheturtle, the mod behind the power trips at r/art (allegedly who took down posts from people who according to said mod were "ai generated art" but actually they weren't), was banned.
dimmke 3y ago
>There are also those who are power hungry, routinely abuse their power I see this argument all the time, but isn't this just human nature? In any organized structure, some people are going to seek out "power" and abuse it. You will find people making the same complaint about their neighbor who is the head of the homeowner association. It's also part of why people become cops, or if they can't get there, security guards. Every broad "type" of community on the internet has had this problem. I remember growing up, there were plenty of capricious IRC moderators and admins as well as moderators of individual forums. Little dictators. I will say, I feel like there was a concerted effort to frame these API changes as specifically being harmful to those with disabilities and moderators (I guess in an attempt to point to short term, immediate concrete harms that would come from this), which opened things up to reframing the whole discussion around as a referendum on moderation. And apparently most people can't make a simple connection and ask "Why did Reddit not care about these flagrant power abuses before? Will they keep caring after this is over?" And it seems like that's been fairly successful. But I still think Reddit has doomed itself with this move.
- msla 3y ago
  Yes, it's human nature. The fact Reddit didn't allow bad moderators to be removed played into it, too, which resulted in some oddities of the website: /r/Marijuana was run by assholes, so /r/Trees became the marijuana subreddit. /r/WorldPolitics was run by moderators who didn't actually moderate the content (other than for the absolute "Sitewide Rules" the admins will remove a subreddit for violating) so it wound up with an absurd amount of cartoon porn, which lead to /r/Anime_Titties becoming the subreddit to discuss world politics. It's funny lore and it lead to the site having culture of a sort, but it points to a failure in upper-level administration. Reddit simply doesn't care about the product it's putting out, beyond some very basic rules aimed at trying to prevent the site itself from being sued, and it shows.

c_crank 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

oceanplexian 3y ago

Reddit would simply contract with some paid content moderators overseas, crank out automated moderation tools (With AI, this is easier than ever) and nothing would change. I worked at a fairly popular social media site about a decade ago and paid content moderation farms were a dime a dozen, I can’t even imagine what it’s like now.

progfix 3y ago
Paid mods will work for the big subreddits, but what about all the smaller ones. Will paid mods have the knowledge or passion to run a subreddit for a niche topic? To promote them or keep them interesting?
- paulmd 3y ago
  those subs may wither but they're not a big revenue source or a big deal in the grand scheme of things. And if the current crop of users leave it doesn't mean nobody is interested in that topic anymore, so the odds are good that users will return in the future. If the mods are still gone at that point, there's abandoned-subreddit procedures that will be executed. And that's the part that mods are trying to exploit for griefing with the "it's not closed, we're just not letting anyone post"/"we're only letting people post unfunny memes in protest"/etc. I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you. Like it's just kind of funny that the mods are literally Going Galt and just like would happen in the real world, they're panicking with the realization that the world is pretty much going to move on without them.
krainboltgreene 3y ago
> With AI, this is easier than ever lolololololol, god i wish reddit would. that would be such an incredible fire.

scoofy 3y ago

I mean, I just disagree. I'm a mod on two large sub (bicycling and sanfrancisco) and a ton of the work is just done by automod and the users now days. The main point of contention would be on subs where the user base is divided in it's moderation desires, e.g., san francisco crime posts. Half the users think the city is just fine and the crime posts make them angry, the other half think the city is falling apart, and therefore think the issues is entirely relevant. In this type of situation, the obvious solution is to split the sub like Seattle/SeattleWA did, but both sides want control over the sub. These cultural control subs are the only ones that I think would "fall apart" without moderation, and even then I think the users would eventually self-select for separate subs. This whole issue has been bizarre, and I definitely did not have the passion about it that some mods do. Still, I think I'm growing weary of moderating, but I think it's mainly that I'm getting old.

gremlinsinc 3y ago
how many people who are mods also are top 20 percent of contributors on Reddit? what happens when they all leave the platform?
- scoofy 3y ago
  Ehh, maybe, but I wouldn’t bet money on it. I think the biggest problem Huffman has is annoying the user base by shittifying the site for increased earnings. New reddit is god awful, and removing pleasant apps continues the trend. I’m still able to use the site with minimal bullshit, but I see the wave coming.