Reddit calls for “a few new mods” after axing, polarizing some of its best

HLMenckenFan@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 707 points –
Reddit calls for “a few new mods” after axing, polarizing some of its best
arstechnica.com
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Hello, Thank for sharing! Seems like it already got posted to !reddit@lemmy.world, maybe we can keep the Reddit discussions over there? There isn't that much technology discussed on Reddit nowadays, it's mostly a sinking ship by now.

Actually most of the discussion happens in !reddit@lemmy.ml

It appears I'm not allowed to interact on that instance, did lemmy.world defederate from lemmy.ml?

Lemmy.ml is dying because the ml domain got picked back up by mali.

Probably the issue with the .ml again

And who could have guessed? U r right, I'm absolutely baffled this is a serious issue...

Hm, interesting, I have no idea unfortunately

That's quite rich, after the way they treated their mods.

Really a sign of them not giving a shit about anyone.

No good person would put up with being a mod for reddit after this shit show with spez. The only incentive to put up with that is the financial gains of allowing astroturfing as a mod (for example) or having a really weird power trip. Very curious to see how reddit will evolve with that kind of leadership

I'm still technically a mod for a small subreddit. I polled the users, they weren't interested in moving over to Lemmy.

(Edit because prematurely posted)

I'm still hoping they'll move over, but tbh it's a good bunch of posters on a niche subject and the mod team has never had to be too active. The topic had a been literally unmodded for years before the current mod team fell into it, so I'm confident we're not needed.

We're literally just a placeholder to keep someone power mad from becoming mod. (Long story long: founding mod abandoned sub, came back after years, was mad the subreddit didn't agree with his crap opinions, made the sub private, I and a few other posters made a new subreddit.)

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They care about revenue. They made it clear during protest. “Well our revenue isn’t really impacted so whatever on we go!!”

But it was and they’re showing their true faces.

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It's precisely what everyone said would happen. Spez and the Reddit team seem not to realise how important mods and users were to their business! The number of people who will do the thankless task of dealing with the internet's undercurrent of horrendous behaviour are few.

It’s precisely what everyone said would happen.

I don't disagree with your general point, but I remember that there were many people (on reddit, but also on lemmy) who said there would be lots of power-hungry redditors just waiting to take over and that the admins would thus have no trouble at all finding replacements.

Let's see how many are willing to go through all that regurgitating shit and survive a month in their new profession.

It's never a good idea to set yourself up to be disappointed in humans because you're gonna be disappointed lol

Those were the same shit-stirrers, and they don't care if they're right or not as long as you can be wrong about something. They're just waiting for that something and they'll start hooting about how smart they are again.

It's not recognizing as such, but refusing to admit someone not directly under the magnificent leadership of the CEO can do anything important or have good ideas on how to run things. Toxic Techbro culture.

To techbros, people doing voluntary work for them is something to be exploited, not rewarded. They see the mods as saps as they would never do anything for free.

I wonder if their plan was to use chatgpt or some AI to pick up the slack with moderation but set things into motion before realizing that AI isn't quite there yet and would need human eyes to verify actions otherwise the AI would have banned everyone or not enough people.

I don't know which scenario is more amusing, the one where they had a plan that failed or the one where they just thought everything would work out fine and what we saw was the plan.

Any luck getting the ask historian mods to switch over to lemmy. That I think would tip the scale permanently

They did make a post about it, Lemmy is no where near large enough for them to be interested. Their mission is to showcase history on a large public platform.

They said they are not happy with how the company has acted, but it would take a much bigger issue to get them to consider moving.

Wonder what the thing that would be tipping point for them would look like.

Either way - shame. I really enjoyed that sub.

It would take times, the more informative content we have (even the what's your top 5 thing posts) that common people use search engine to look up for and find, the more we will get exposure, just like how reddit find its audience. Imo, as long as lemmy doesn't get into front page of search engine, I'm afraid the number of lemmyverse users that migrate from reddit won't sharply increase unless reddit does more fuckups. This might also mean, there will be inevitably one or a select few big lemmy instances that will get more exposure.

In any case, it's not necessarily a bad thing; Lemmy (and kbin) needs a lot of improvement to be accessible to most people. Let people that are tech-savvy and those who are passionate in open-source projects improve it first. Otherwise, others will try and find lemmy too complicated to use as it is right now and not interested in using it later down the road.

Just my 0.02

I also don't think Lemmy is ready for everyone, especially in terms of moderation. The tools are very limited and hard to access. I have to navigate to each post to deal with it, and the only 3 options (right next to one another) are 'remove post', 'ban from community' and 'appoint as mod'.

There's also no modmail or automod tools, which are really important as a community gets large.

It's fine for now with the communities I'm moderating, but I'd understand if some Reddit communities don't feel ready

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Honest question. Wouldn't them coming over here be good and make it larger?

I mean yeah, it would be good, and maybe make it larger, but reddit has 100 million MAU and we have less than 1% of that. They're not wrong that moving would massively impact their reach. I don't think 99+ million people will move for AskHistorians.

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Although I also doubt that it will happen until Lemmy gets some good moderation tools first. In its current state, it wouldn't quite fit what they need to do with the sub, especially with the heavy moderation that they would need to do.

What tools are needed and missing?

Any type of automatic moderation. It is a godsend for managing a community as you don't have to worry about content with or breaking those roles as the bot(s) check it for you.

What's special about those mods?

They moderate rigorously.

Participating in one of their threads is like attending a university course.

Most people don’t have the context to actually participate in the discussions, but the quality is on a completely different level.

The answers on that subreddit are probably the highest quality answers on all of Reddit.

The mods are very strict and keep the quality exceptionally high

Wild. I don't find extremely moderated subs to be an example of what I want to see here. I felt just as bad going to subs like that as I did going to subs where the mods don't do anything to control the users. IMO, (and I realize it's very much MY OWN opinion), is that discussion shouldn't ever be purged unless it's illegal or hate speech.

What about spam? Stuff completely unrelated to the community? Porn?

Certain heavily moderated subs made sense, like ask historians, where the purpose of the sub was to have actually knowledgeable responses instead of internet ass-pulling.

Honestly in some cases, it might be preferable to the heavy moderation I've seen. I can close a spam post or porn post in a second, but it takes a bit more work to restore an entire thread of hundreds of comments to see the discussion because some mod didn't like it.

Given how ban happy subreddit mods can be, I don't know that that's the best idea in the world.

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Hah! I can't wait for the next devaluation to drop.

The incompetence of Reddit staff in recent years has especially impressed me.

The incompetence of Reddit staff in recent years has especially impressed me

Tell me about it, I just got a 7 day ban of promoting hate on a samsung sub and my comment had nothing to do with it lol. Some guy decided to randomly abuse and harass me, I reported him and he obviously reported me. I notice he got banned right away but days later so did I for nothing? Lol shows how incompetence and in shambles that the new mods are in.

Ooooh yes. Something similar happened to me out of the blue back in January. I commented, verbatim:

Random fact that I recently learned and thought was kind of cool. One of the very first responses of your body when you get a cut or infection is to synthesize hydrogen peroxide in the area that signals your white blood cells to rally to that area.

I then linked to Science Daily and Harvard articles about it.

Temporary ban for "Harassment," citing this comment.

Later on I incurred another infraction and my account was permabanned, citing my previous strike as justification for the permanent ban. Smfh. 250 characters to appeal...

Meanwhile these idiots excused cesspools like The_Donald for years. Meanwhile I report a person being objectively racist (Calling them "out of control" and "absolutely feral savages") and... They reviewed it not once but twice and found nothing wrong. LOL.

I wrote this all up in a medium article in more detail but I'm half-tempted to send all my screenshots to Fidelity and some news outlets for shits.

Wow. I've had other ridiculous bans in the past too.

Best one was banned for sexual harassment and being 'toxic'.

It was back when u/theawkwardturtle was blowing up a storm and some feminist banned me for the word 'ok' because she said anyone who would oppose me and awkwardturtle by commenting are going to get a permanent ban and a harassment violation from reddit.

Next mine I was banned from that sub and I got a temp ban from reddit for the word 'ok' lmao.

Tried to appeal for the hell of it months later and the mod denied me instantly and said what i done was atrocious and I deserve my ban, called me a horrible human being and said I was a sexualising predator etc.

I've always hated reddit mods but man I'm glad I'm not that active on that sespool of hate anymore.

Somehow I missed all that controversy. Looking it up now, wow what a shit-show. Just to clarify for anyone else reading this, it was the user AwkwardTheTurtle not theawkwardturtle.

I was permanently banned from r/militaryporn for pointing out that MRAP was the name of a family of vehicles and not of a single particular one. Some former marine took strange emotional offense at this and spewed a lot of personal insults at me as I linked details a few times to the history of the program. The person commenting at me got extremely vile and an uncalled for, while also being confidently wrong. I just linked facts and didn’t insult in response.

Then I was perma banned. Tis a silly place.

If you're using a Samsung at this point it's safe to say you hate yourself lol

? Sounds like a little bit jealousy and resentment but ok.

lmfao - may a well just reach out to ol' Hitler Murdoch over at Fox to help him fill his holes

well at least they got rid of some of the hungry powermods, i couldnt care less about reddit moderators though

Holy hell this thread is full of boot slobber. What the fuck is so good to you guys about having a mod over your shoulder ever second making sure you don't step out of whatever line they decided to draw in their imaginary sand?

Reddit Mods were never good. They were some of the worst people on Reddit. The admins are the only people worse than the mods.

For a lot of the big subs, sure. But every mod I encountered in the hobby/food/gardening subs were good and ran good spaces.

I can't figure out where all the lemmy people posting about reddits "power tripping power mods" were posting. I think I ran across one mod in the wild (niche sub) that I thought was crazy and they got run off the platform eventually. What were people posting that they were getting banned all over the place? Maybe the mods weren't the problem if multiple were banning you?

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I was a good mod my users said :)

you're cool :)

What I said applies to big subreddit mods. I think most niche or small subreddit mods were great.

There are also bad power tripping mods on Lemmy.

Seriously, 90% of Reddit mods are on a power trip, they permanently ban you and mute you instantly at the slightest transgression or if they just don't like you. Also, everyone single one of them claims to be one of the good ones, lol.

90% of mods did non obvious work like stopping spammers from overrunning subs.

If you think they all ban for fun then the problem is you.

Most mods tend to follow the quantity of reports they receive from the community. If you post something that triggers lots of random users... then you are screwed.

And yes, that also happens on Lemmy... as much as folks around here consider it as a "holy ground filled with saints". :^)

t. A mod threatened to ban me because I was "spamming" -- while I was posting once per day.

Ah, but when a subreddit had mostly mods from that 10%,

AskHistorians, AskScience, WhatIsThisThing, etc.

Maybe this is another example of Sturgeon's law.

Don't know, I stopped visiting WhatIsThisThing after an encounter with a really trippy mod that handed out bans like candy. But maybe they got kicked and striped of their role

That's the case for every sub with a political undertone.

Most subs for your favourite hobby is usually nice. Unless your hobby is US politics, believing walking dogs 5 hours a week is a job, or inventing a patriarchal society to tear down.

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