Reddit CEO says the mods leading a punishing blackout are too powerful and he will change the site's rules to weaken them

AllonzeeLV@vlemmy.net to World News@beehaw.org – 300 points –
Reddit CEO says the mods leading a punishing blackout are too powerful and he will change the site's rules to weaken them
businessinsider.com
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I do think it must be hard for some of the mods. Me I can just walk away from this madness. Mods if you have put your heart and soul into it... well harder. Still how can it be much clearer. Time to move on for them too.

Specially for some mods of the smaller more niche subs. I talked to one who supports the blackout but couldn't do it for fear that he/she would lose the small community he/she has.

I don't have much sympathy for this. If you really just care about the community, then just move the community to lemmy/kbin/discord/irc/whatever. These people are just afraid to lose their power over the community, not the community itself.

Easier said than done. I doubt the decision to move to another place would be unanimous. If I were in a sub that decided to move someplace else, I wouldn't join if they were migrating to a site I don't like for whatever reason. Another example: some subs that migrated here still have active communities in reddit and members that didn't join the migration. For a small sub, that hurts more.

People value things differently.

Yeah I love the subreddit I moderate and haven't felt ready to "pull the plug" and walk away completely, though I'm putting up more boundaries around the time I put in to moderating, and have created an account here to start exploring Reddit alternatives, especially if this API thing ends up being step one (or maybe more like step five lol) of a larger "enshittification" process. More broadly speaking I feel like I've seen stuff like this happen enough times online to realize that the profit incentive itself is just harmful, so I want to support and be a part of communities that aren't ultimately going to ruin themselves for the sake of profit

Yeah this is definitely step 5 type of deal. A while ago, they stopped adding api features for apps. So most apps couldn't add any functionality. And not only that but even if you do somehow keep access to the api, you can't do so with NSFW content. So they also took away something from api access.

Then there was the thing where apps couldn't start with the name Reddit (like Reddit Boost had to turn into Boost for Reddit). I think Reddit is Fun was okay because it sounded less like an official app and just describing reddit or something. Not sure why they got to keep it.

The whole new reddit redesign to feel more like Facebook is just gross.

All the 9,000+ awards that meant nothing? Like you get a free one a day and maybe you get the wholesome one so you ironically give that award to a post about dying animals or something. So many posts just have so many random "awards" that it just feels like jingling keys in front of us to keep us engaged.

Reddit may not be dead yet. Maybe not for a while. But I'm not going to be holding on to the very last second. It's been getting worse for a long time and this was just a good excuse to jump before it gets worse.

It will be fun to see what changes they make to moderators due to the blackout of this highly unpopular decision that they refuse to back down from.

Reddit is Fun (RIF) had to rename to "rif is fun" as well

I want to support and be a part of communities that aren't ultimately going to ruin themselves for the sake of profit

I agree. If I found lemmy before all of this, even in 2022, I probably would have signed up.

Yeah, it was hard enough for me to walk away from my small hobby subs as a user, I can’t imagine the difficulty as a moderator. They’re usually some of the most invested in the subject to want to become a moderator in the first place, and then they’ve devoted all the time and energy to it for the love of the community. I don’t envy them either.

I don't have much sympathy for this. If you really just care about the community, then just move the community to lemmy/kbin/discord/irc/whatever. These people are just afraid to lose their power over the community, not the community itself.

It looks like you duplicate-commented this, FYI.