Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is fighting a losing battle against the site's moderators
Untitled9999@kbin.social to 
News@kbin.social – 151 points – 
qz.com
The company wants to charge for API access. Its volunteer moderators have other ideas
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I just went back to log in for the first time in a week and took a look at one of my most frequented subs (Austria) to see what is going on. Apparently the mods decided to allow posts only about an Austrian children‘s show character who is a bike.
However, in the comments where I looked overwhelmingly the users whined about power tripping mods and that they should be removed and are undemocratic for not letting users choose the topic and nobody cares about 3rd party apps and they should just shut up and go back to normal.
So if that were my entire impression of this it wouldn‘t be that the mods are winning. Maybe a draw since I can also see the mood on here.
I‘d think it‘s maybe "opinion forming" bots if it weren‘t some of them in Austrian and I doubt Reddit would use bots for German opinions. So it seems genuine to me, only the spez bootlickers are left. I‘m never going back, let them have it.
I noticed this too. It seems some people just arent ready to let it go and are blaming this protest for decreasing the number of users on the sub. What they fail to realize is that a lot of the people who left are probably using third party apps and wont have access to reddit after they lose API access. We will really see the extent of this in July?
Yeah true, in July we‘ll see some interesting movement in this battle. I‘m expecting people to come here and I want to have content ready for them, so I‘m going to focus on growing this now. I pilfered some memes from one of my subs and making an effort for the first time to not just comment, but post too.
I just think that most of the people complaining probably don't want to mod themselve. As long as reddit has no way to replace most of the mods and as long as the mods keep up their protest reddit will only be semi-functional.
My experience on Reddit over the past couple of years is that the users are terrible arbiters of what should be allowed. It's possibly different on a regional sub like r/Austria, but on other specific topic subs, off-topic posts routinely get huge numbers of upvotes.
Even when the rules that are made to enforce topicality are very clear, most new posts don't adhere to them. Take r/leopardsatemyface where the poster has to answer an automod comment that specifies 3 steps to determine if the content fits. There are usually a few commenters pointing out how it doesn't fit at all while vastly upvoted comment threads just discuss what was seen in the post regardless.
My point is that if it were up to the users, anything would go and there would be effectively one sub. Although there are power hungry mods I consider the thoughts of the average user in many subs to have little use or relevance to how things should work.
Well, about that...: https://web.archive.org/web/20230607173747/https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/13p889x/reddit\_admins\_were\_just\_caught\_using\_bots\_or\_fake/
Wow ok I see, whenever I think they can‘t go lower they get out the Limbo skills. So not even foreign language is safe from bot influence by the admins.
If they plug a LLM like ChatGPT into that to make it less clunky, people wouldn’t be able to tell either, there is already plenty of sceptics on bots even when they are being kinda obvious.
Not that we‘re entirely safe either, but I‘d hope here at least some of the devs and admins would try and stop that instead using it themselves..
Unfortunately they seem to have already been doing that as well. There was a thread in r/programming before the blackout where people were commenting about the number of other comments that were in opposition to the blackout. The whole thread was filled with people finding that most of them were LLM bots:
https://i.imgur.com/4e9jO7P.jpg
What the fuck you guys are blowing my mind with all these links, we‘re already much further along in this than I thought possible. Is anyone or anything even real anymore? Are you a LLM? Say something offensive! (Jk don‘t wanna get you banned)
You know, the funny thing is that might actually work! There are things that LLMs are made to censor that real humans would still be be able to talk about. Granted, most those things would probably get us in trouble or put on a list, so I'm not sure how feasible that would be Maybe a decent idea would be if we could all pick a 'safe-word' out of those things that could be used to tell humans from bots.
This works until they use bots trained on the safe word / phrase
Yeah it‘s crazy to think about, the only such thing I can think of is some "eat the rich" type of stuff, cause that also goes against their owners so they wouldn‘t be able to say it probably.
Well, anything is possible, they could well program them to do anything and curse like sailors, I just saw on Twitch is now a livestream of AI Trump vs. AI Biden, they insult the chat and each other in more ways than I’d ever think of.