Originally published at: Reddit plans to remove moderators of popular subreddits leading protests against site changes | Boing Boing
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Gotta love the CEO of a company that generates revenue exclusively through user submitted content calling people who provide free labor “landed gentry” without a hint of irony.
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Yeah. Just removed the app from my phone and turned off the email notifications through the site. I won’t close out completely just yet, but I’m not planning to go back for a long time.
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I never was on Reddit, didn’t need to use it to refine google searches, and thus was never actually invested, personally.
That said, I feel for the users and I will miss the Drag Race snippets that folks used to send me when we couldn’t find them anywhere else.
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Dumb analogy. Unlike land, you can press a button, and poof, another competing subreddit for users to chose from.
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The most popular reddits are the best moderated ones - because if I wanted a horde of vile posters, I would go to twitter.
If he reduces the ability to moderate (which has already taken damage from the ban on 3rd party app access) he’ll have nothing left for his IPO.
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Some of us (extra sans-culotte’d nerdies) have already slouched off to Lemmy (a Mastodon-like discussion forum thingy) and i haphazardly deem it: worthy. At least for my humble nerdy tech news “communities”. Do i feel i’ve done a shiny political thing for thus turning away from an newly elon_musky reddit? …eh, maybe a little [index/thumb tiny gesture emoji]
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That exact thing happened, in fact, for fans of the webcomic Questionable Content. The original subreddit’s mods lost their shit when Jeph introduced a main character who was trans and lost it even more when the original main character started dating her. So that subreddit is now nothing but guys whining about woke and spending a ridiculous amount of time re-captioning the actual comic to make dumb “anti-woke” content. I think they even banned Jeph from the sub. So actual fans made a new subreddit.
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Holy shit - they’re just determined to torch the whole thing and burn it all down, aren’t they?
I mean, they seem to literally be taking Twitter under Musk as a model.
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It’s interesting watching executives appropriate historical user anger at the site’s volunteer moderators
And interesting to be on the site and notice in real time the uptick in comments trashing moderators, as if folks aren’t cognizant of the sock puppetry. Dimwits.
But corporate vultures have always appropriated the language of the people in order to convince them to kick down at each other instead of up. Frankly, mods of the big groups at this point probably should just delete the groups in a final blaze of protest glory and quit the site. Reddit is going to come for them, and nothing can stop them at this point. They have the money, and we have… nothing.
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Very strong “the elites in the senate sneer at you, but once we remove them and I am the sole voice of government, finally the nation will speak with your voice through me” vibes.
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I went to reddit because it had some really good transgender related support forums. After the Tumblr porn ban, a lot of the folks I interacted with moved over there, so I have spent a significant amount of time over on Reddit.
That said, if you are trans? It’s a total shit show. Seemingly reasonable subs are hot beds of racism, transphobia, and got knows what else, so you really have to curate your experience if you don’t want to see it. Even then, trans subs are heavily moderated to keep out constant attacks, and if you post prolifically on a trans sub, you will get private hate DMs. It’s just a reality.
I’ve been off Reddit the last three days, and after years of daily use? I don’t miss it. I certainly don’t miss Reddits overarching policy of ignoring hate until it hits the news.
If anyone has any good alternatives with a good trans community, I am all ears, but right now? I am not sure I am going back. Even my favorite writer, u/slightlyassaholic just hit Royal Road, and that was my main reason for going back this week.
I don’t get the current CEO because we all left MySpace, and Geocities, and we will all leave Reddit eventually. It’s not an if, just a when. Hell, Facebook is a rotting shell filled with boomers and commerce sites. None of these sites last forever.
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Yeah, this has very strong shades of Melon Husk’s ideas about how social media sites work.
Namely, the idea that the platform provides more value to its most active contributors than they provide to the platform, and that they do it for self aggrandizement rather than out of desire to create something. Whereas in reality, the core contributors are usually ~5% of users who provide the content that makes the platform an appealing destination to the 95% of users who are mostly consumers — but who are the ones who click and give impressions on the ads.
As someone who is a Reddit mod, let me tell you – it is not a glamorous job, and the “power” of it is mostly just trying to parse the subtle distinctions between good faith behavior that happens to have a disruptive effect and behavior that is intended to disrupt.
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I think I get him. The problem is thinking that he has the best outcome for Reddit in mind; he does not. He has the best outcome (payday) for himself in mind… Yes, these changes will rot Reddit from the inside. But in the meantime they will make the financials look good for Wall Street.
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I suppose that CEO needs to talk to Kevin Rose on how a community can vaporize over night.
Then again I dived on to Reddit before DIGG died and I stopped using Reddit regularly after 2016. Too much gamer gate spilling over in places and then Trump turning up the awful made me run. I knew shit was bad where I had have an addon that would tag users that were posters in toxic subreddits.
We just hit that stage of Reddit, what did Cory Doctorow call it again? The enshittification of social media.
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Giving considerable power to mods has allowed Reddit to avoid the situation of Twitter and Facebook, where the companies need to scale their moderation teams with their userbase, which makes them big, “heavy” companies (well, at least as long as they care about moderation). Rather than needing a huge corps of employee moderation to keep things from going off the rails, they have the much smaller task of moderating whole subs rather than specific posts and comments. By taking power away from the mods there is a hidden cost that Wall Street will likely take too long to discover: they are either a) taking on more moderation responsibility themselves, with the costs associated with that, or b) becoming more of an unmoderated wild west, with all the awfulness and ad-revenue-killing results that entails. Either way, I submit that the net impact will be worse for their balance sheet than whatever income they might hope to gain from AI companies (who likely will simply train their models on other, cheaper sources of data.)
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I’m right there with you. I found most of the trans communities on Reddit to be toxic as hell and quickly removed myself from the subreddits. Even ones that branched off to Discord groups and had some level of moderation there quickly showed themselves to be questionable at best. When I found myself arguing about the inherit dangers of some of the decisions of the 20-something trans folks were making, I just finally gave up. I deleted a 12-year old account without even thinking one evening and haven’t missed it at all.
As a trans person myself, I sincerely hope you find the community you need out there. I’ve been unable to do so either online or in-person in one of the largest cities in the US which is supposedly LGBTQ+ friendly.
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Check out https://beehaw.org/c/lgbtq_plus. It’s a lemmy instance (like theophrastus mentioned) but they’re very heavily curated to be a safe space for people in minority communities.
You can also check out other lemmy instances and see how their communities are; because beehaw is very strict about their moderation, they’ve deliberately cut themselves off from some of the larger instances. Where you fall on the balance between having a small, heavily curated community and a larger one that’s more prone to the occasional asshole may determine if beehaw specifically or lemmy in general are good solutions for you.
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