6 ms·

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 mo

by 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.

by riffic 3y ago

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.