Reddit were threatening to de-private the subs and replace the mods. When they can do, but will likely kill the community anyway for small communities. Perhaps big ones are anonymous enough for that to work.
Do you think it's possible to pay a new group of people and have them care as much as the people who met voluntarily out of sheer interest and dedication to their community? I doubt it.
Edit: not that I'm against paying mods, I support that. But replacing enthusiast mods with paid mods, I doubt that'll be adequate.
The obvious example here is /r/AskHistorians. Notoriously among the strictest subreddits, and an absolute treasure to read as a result. There is zero chance it could be maintained by paid staff without a serious search for qualified people.
There's a bit in Predictably Irrational by Daniel Ariely where he talks about social compensation vs. market compensation (I could be remembering the terms wrong). He asks how poorly it would go if you went to Thanksgiving dinner with your grandmother, and after eating the amazing spread you handed her a $20 and said, "That's for the great food, gran, it was amazing!"
Their whole business model is that you have free labor to moderate the subs. They can't afford to pay for all subs and will become centralized in a few subs only.
As the front page of the Internet, I would hope someone there has enough imagination to find a way to pay the people that do the work. If not, do we really have an Internet?
If I consider it from the perspective of reddit inc, probably. Get some cheap labor where I can pay as little per hour as possible, and get rid of people who can strike without losing anything. The people I'll hire for cheap won't strike because I do unlikable changes like pushing out 3rd party apps or try to get rid of NSFW content. And if they do, I'll just fire them and replace with someone else.
Gets rid of a nuisance relatively easy, but degrades the quality. But reddit doesn't seem to care much about quality for the last years so.
Maybe it could have a good effect ironically, the problem with Reddit's moderation is the actual moderators. They mostly seem to be self righteous narcissists and have been the cancer killing reddit for the past decade. Purging them all and starting over with a clean slate could bring new life and freshness to the septic tank of a community it has become.
I don't care about the reddit API but I am enjoying watching the this dumpster fire burn. Popcorn sure does taste good indeed.
Most "bad" moderators I've encountered could easily be explained by potentially being a stressed, overworked volunteer who takes a lot of shit from assholes all the time.
I think my explanation is at least as plausible as yours with the added benefit of not denigrating an entire group.
It’s a generalization, but it holds true on Internet communities in general that the most dedicated people who want and obtain mod power start out beforehand with less than ideal mental health, which is often a contributing factor as to why they have the enormous amounts of free time to moderate communities for free in the first place.
Obviously there’s exceptions, but it is a really common phenomenon. They found communities or get modded simply because they spend the most time and hang out in the right chats, not because they’re objectively great neutral moderators. They are very frequently people with very strong personalities, and are often in the long-term have a more destructive influence on communities than any short-lived comment troll, especially wrt to the effect on newcomers as they tend to make communities increasingly insular.
So, it's your contention that the sort of people who gravitate towards positions of power/authority without any effective oversight and who have the technical means to essentially erase evidence...
These same people, are just overstressed and take too much shit, and this explains the vast majority of all alleged abuses?
I've heard this before. I hear it every time someone is shot to death while crawling towards their attackers while being screamed at to not move and come closer simultaneously. Every time that someone dies with a knee on their neck for 10 minutes. Every time a grenade is thrown into a baby's crib.
That's about the most generous I can be. Reddit moderators have not actually thrown grenades into baby cribs. They're not quite as bad as those that do throw grenades into babies' cribs.
I've seen a lot of both: there are some power-tripping selective-enforcement bully types in those volunteer moderator roles, on Reddit or Facebook or Discord or wherever, and then there are the moderators that try to act with integrity and tend to get burnt out by insufferable agitators and the general lack of respect from the crowd they moderate. I also don't get the sense they're wholly separate groups.
I could probably pick just about any large volunteer group, online or otherwise, and I'd agree.
>tend to get burnt out
People can also just overcommit to volunteer activities in general for a period. If people can just dial down their involvement, that can be OK. But if it's an activity that's all-in or nothing, it probably won't last for more than a while as people burn out or their priorities just change.
I’ve never been an active Redditor, but there are people discussing my open source software on Reddit, so I’ve answered questions there on a good number of occasions.
That my informative and completely rule-abiding posts can be made unavailable at the whim of some community mods while the site is still alive feels like a betrayal. These mods don’t own my posts. No complaint if Reddit goes the way of Digg and takes everything with it.
That sounds naive. Your contributions were only needed and possible because of the volunteers that built the community you participated in. These mode don't own your posts, you can publish them anywhere you like after the community is gone. If you rely on an unpaid commercial entity to preserve your content forever I have bad news for you.
My contributions were possible because I and a bunch of other non-mods contributed. As I said, I expect the commercial entity to preserve my content until the entity decides not to, not some random third party.
My prior experience moderating other forums tells me the contribution of these community moderators are often way exaggerated and usually easily replaceable. Some form personality cults and periodic rotation would actually be a good thing.
Pretty sure taking the subreddit private as a form of protest is an unintended abuse of "delegated responsibility", and they can take that back at any time. Which is what they are considering anyway if gp is to be believed.
You think that people Reddit would have to appoint on such short notice with no experience of the prior community will be _less_ likely to go on power trips?
Yeah... if unpaid mods get screwed over and their reasonable tools destroyed, if greedy IPOism rules and starts price gouging third parties on short notice, and if there is a crack-CEO who even goes so far as manipulating other's posts in the backend to make users look bad - all fine. They all knew they were operating on a platform where they should have expected this. But while I'm in no way an active user, but my some comments I made become unavailabe, gosh I will be angry!!! Lol (:
Why exactly would it be crazy? A few mods taking a community of half a billion hostages is not crazy?
If I were spez I would simply disable the ability to make new subreddits private.
This protest is not for the greater good, it's harming half a billion users for the benefit (actually, for no benefit since nothing will come out of it) of the 3% that want to not see ads and use the 3rd party apps.
Running a subreddit is an alternative to running your own forum. An alternative thats much easier to get up and running, so it's a very popular one.
If Reddit does a mass replacement of mods, the illusion is broken. You're not running your own forum, you're doing free work for some website. So if you want to create a place to discuss X, then you dont think to make a subreddit for X, you go with something you actually control or far more likely just somewhere the illusion hasn't been broken; like create a discord server.
That illusion is what has made Reddit basically the forum. It's the whole value of the site. Destroying the thing that makes your site valuable is crazy.
How many times do you get a Discord server in your Google results when searching for something?
Reddit's value proposition is not the ego stroking of the 0.0000001% that are moderators, it's the discoverability and interoperability between unrelated niches.
If little dictators don't get their kick from rulling lawlessly on a community anymore, I say good ridance.
Ego stroking of some mods is far from what is happening.. please get the full picture. Those unpaid mods that did work for Reddit for free get their tools taken away they need to do this unpaid work reasonably, while at the same time Reddit starts price gouging 3rd party apps to extract more value for their IPO - Reddit wouldn't be there where it is today if it wouldn't have all the free content of the users and free work of the mods.
Kind of ridiculous, but I mean how Reddit is acting, they can just remove those unpaid moderators, replace them with paid ones and restore everything back to normal: If that is your's and also Reddit's view, where is the problem then?
Only 3% of moderation actions come from from third-party apps [1]. What was that again about taking away the tools the moderators are using?
This whole thing about third-party apps has been ridiculously mismanaged by the communities.
The only 2 reasons people want to keep third-party apps are 1) they prefer them to the official one, 2) they don't want ads. Both of those reasons are valid, but neither are even remotely close to justifying the actions that those Reddit nerds are taking.
The communities are what made the Reddit results so relevant.
I get not being sympathetic with petty kings of message boards, but let’s be real, Reddit is an awful company whose incompetence is legendary. They’ve failed to monetize, failed to maintain the user experience and now are failing to keep a vital aspect of their business going.
Ultimately their failure is a good thing. Reddit broke the internet by ending the phpbb era. Time for the next thing.
> >How many times do you get a Discord server in your Google results when searching for something?
> What does this have to do with what I wrote?
You are suggesting that those users will go away from Reddit to form separate dedicated communities, and I am saying that they will try but fail to attract people.
Reddit allows the vast majority of the subs that participate in the blackout to survive simply because they are a part of Reddit and benefit from its infrastructure and features.
You really think a website dedicated to cute animals will attract 34M subscribers like /r/aww? And another one with the exact same theme will attract 4M subscribers (with a lot of overlap) like /r/Eyebleach?
Those communities exist and strive because the barrier to entry is literally non-existent. It takes one input to create them and one click to join them.
> Odd because I get the impression you prefer the communities those little dictators create to be on a google crawlable site over discord.
I would prefer if there were no little dictators, with elections every 3 months, showing detailed stats of the moderators actions, and most of the moderation to be in the style of StackOverflow, so community driven.
The problem is that people are (a) using the 3rd party apps for entirely genuine usability reasons beyond ads and (b) while the API users may only be a small percentage, they're the ones holding the site together. Few moderators use only Reddit official tooling. Some have built quite sophisticated tools to automate their work. /r/music mention of having their own server for some purpose: https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/141tzgd/comment/jn2l...
The notorious Digg collapse was in part because of their fight with a big poster who was dominating the rankings and in the process supplying a lot of the content. They won against him, and the rest is history. Similar with Vine.
I think this might be an extreme case of misunderstanding how internet communities work.
Without comments, HN would be just a boring link aggregator and we'd get very little information if the article was BS or not. But because we have comments we get gems at times where 'the creator of X' discusses the merits of the article. That can be nearly priceless. Things like this draw people that don't upvote and don't comment, but they still get immense value from it.
Posts are what makes Reddit, so much so that Reddit created hundreds of fraudulent profiles in their early days to fake popularity.
Of course this interests me what the future looks like for social media. At one time in the past you needed users to generate and post content. Could we end up with social media sites with 'good enough' bots faking humans that draw in the masses, but few biological commenters and posters would exist?
You're talking about the 3%(?) that actually make the community, discussion, and value (the reason people show up in the first place, randomly or via seach).
I think most subs that are a few hundred thousand won't really notice the difference.
The big subs that they would 100% do it on that are a few million plus, you would never really notice. /r/pics, /r/gaming, etc who even pays attention to who the mods are. The mods aren't the community.
If Reddit replaces volunteer mods with paid mods we would get a more consistent moderation and almost certainly a more professional experience. People getting banned for disagreeing with a mod would stop for example. You wouldn't have to guess what the mods mean by their rules. For example, on /r/startups replying to people giving them an answer and saying if you have any more questions I'm free is called an unauthorised ask me anything. Which is crazy. There are many subs where it's anyone's guess what the rules are. And it can literally depend on the mood of the moderator. There are some subreddits that automatically ban people who have posted in certain subreddits.
Moderation is an important job. It's needed. But I can't think of any other social site that has such a bad rep for moderation.
> If Reddit replaces volunteer mods with paid mods we would get a more
> consistent moderation and almost certainly a more professional experience.
I can guarantee you the opposite. You'll have a site-wide abusable
Scunthorpe-incompatible report-based automated moderation with no proper appeal
mechanism in place because half a dozen underpaid interns/offshored employees
will be responsible for taking over the work of hundreds of moderators.
It's already happening in some cases. There's ways to make reports go directly
to the so-called Anti-Evil Operations team who will irrevocably override any
moderation decision and enforce abusive reports.
It's easy to get people banned, post some hateful content, wait for reports,
and then report the reports for report abuse.
> But I can't think of any other social site that has such a bad rep for moderation.
There are some legitimate cases of poorly moderated subreddits and mod abuse
(and the whole powermod issue), but beware, most of the time people complaining
about power-tripping mods and "not being able to say anything anymore" have
been banned for very good reasons (those reasons being straight-up hate speech
most of the time).
Yes, but we even give murderers due process. You don't have any civil liberties with reddit, but if the punishment doesn't fit the crime or you know they just used the rules as a pretext to squash dissent, it's going to leave a bad taste.
They can do whatever they want with their platform, but I can also not like mods who make decisions I don't agree with.
I also don't think mods should be allowed to ban people just for being subscribed to other subs or having posted there. The whole idea that I co-sign everything the sub stands for just because I read it tells you all you need to know: they expect and often demand that you do in fact co-sign everything the sub stands for.
And that's the fundamental problem with reddit, really. It's not just the keyword squatting mods: it's that it's a giant social experiment that distills the worst of mob behavior and anonymity.
Fixing reddit requires some kind of check on the mods and the elimination or complete overhaul of the karma system.
I'm not so sure, yes the mods are pretty anonymous on the bigger subs, but they do a tonne of work and have a tonne of experience on how to actually moderate the subs. There's a whole host of rules that have grown up around each of these communities that have been learned through bitter experience. So sure, you might not notice tomorrow if /r/pics moderators all got replaced, but I guarantee you over the next 6 months the sub-reddit would change in character significantly.
You can employ paid moderators, I don't think it's a terrible idea from a quality of user experience perspective. It's an awful idea from a "We're desperately trying to get this fucking company to IPO".
> Moderation is an important job. It's needed. But I can't think of any other social site that has such a bad rep for moderation.
Pretty much every other social site of note doesn't have a rep for moderation, on account of not having moderation at all. A solid 20% or higher of the YouTube comments I see are straight-up phishing scams, Facebook and Twitter are complete cesspits where only content that's literally illegal to post ever gets removed, and the less said about imageboards the better.
Wikipedia is the only even remotely comparably large site I can think of that actually has anything resembling moderation, and you'll find the exact same crowd criticising them for enforcing their rules as well.
Years ago I had to manage SMTP servers. Of course a huge part of that is dealing with spam. Users were mad about how much spam they got and asked if "I was even doing my job". In one particular users case, they did get a lot of spam, and it was a pain in the ass to deal with and they always had lots of complaints. So I showed them for ever 3 messages they received I blocked somewhere near 1000 messages to their address.
If you've never been on that side of the system you don't know what 'not having moderation at all' looks like, but I can tell you it looks far, far, far worse than YT psts.
What you're describing is administration, not moderation. Very similar concepts, but there's an absolutely gigantic difference in the feel of a community with active moderation versus a site like YouTube where the overwhelming majority of all user-submitted content is never looked at by a single human with the ability to remove it. Often by design - an SMTP server does not have the same use cases as a forum board, and doesn't need the same kind of hands-on attention that a social service requires to be enjoyable.
In theory channel owners have the ability to handle that for YouTube specifically, but in practice the tools and incentives aren't there to make it actually happen.
If they pick moderators, those moderators are no longer volunteers, but employees & agents of Reddit, Inc. — and because of legal precedents with how moderators were engaged with AOL & LiveJournal, anything those technically-employee-agents of Reddit, Inc do wrong with respect to criminal activity and torts, Reddit Inc is on the hook for.
That’s why they use the volunteer mod model, and why they keep us at arm’s-length, and mandate that we cannot receive any compensation of any kind from anyone for moderating.
That said —
The mod code of conduct gives them avenues for removing mods that violate it; there’s also neutral admin-developed tools that identify users who are already active in helping the community out as potential moderator recruits.
So mods that close subreddits maliciously — with an intent to damage Reddit or to demand that they disburse money to a third party — could be removed from mod privileges, and replacements found.
I'm pretty sure that's not what Section 230 says - in fact, the opposite, which is that reddit cannot be held responsible for the content on the site, even if reddit employees are moderating content. Sounds to me more like reddit trying to spin a false narrative (if that in fact is what they've said) to take advantage of free labor.
i mean also given that reddit has actually picked moderators on subs that need it in the past (like /r/redditrequest exists), i'm pretty sure this is just made up
No, no, no, no, no. This is one of those Section 230 myths that somehow keeps circulating. It does not matter if moderators are paid or volunteer. Section 230 says nothing about this. AOL won all those lawsuits -- Zeran v AOL (1997), Blumenthal v. Drudge (1998), Doe v AOL (2001), Green V. AOL (2003).
Now, reddit may SAY that this is the case as an excuse, but it isn't the truth.
This is absolutely not the case, if you've spent much time in the Reddit ecosystem you would know that frequently mods go rogue and Reddit staff have to step in to appoint new mods and some times whole new mod teams.
Since you're definitely the same Steve as the one on Reddit, how do you feel posting here without the ability to ban people for asking if you've started paying your child support?
No. That’s the issue. Without moderators and posters, there’s no subreddits. Without Reddit, Inc., there’s no subreddits. In my experience, when trapped in a causality dilemma, it’s preferable to be thankful for both the chicken and the egg and not ask too many questions.
