Steve Huffman mad about blackout, wants to make it easier to remove moderators.

Tangent@lemmy.world to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 519 points – Popular subreddits plan to extend blackouts indefinitely | Engadget
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The funniest part of the article is how he's slamming the actions of unpaid moderators while saying "they’re mad because they used to get something for free, and now it’s going to be not free".

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Pretty damn rich coming from the CEO of a website that makes no content of its own.

Never mind all those mods who work for free that they're chosing to screw over and sabotage. I'm sure this won't have any negative consequences.

We're gonna see reddit go the "free speech" route because that's cheaper than hiring mods. Course they could have kept things the way they were and got their mods for free, but w/e lmao.

Reddit is gonna get flooded with garbage content and bigoted shit and most people are gonna leave. Hopefully they'll come here.

Today I made the jump and deleted my last account. I used Reddit one way or another for the last 16 years. It feels weird, but at the same time, I simply couldn't support the platform anymore. Being honest, it hasn't been like the platform I once loved using for a long time. Bots run rampant, the same two to three memes get regurgitated over and over and Spez has just been the idiot to break the camel's back.

yep, deleted my 11 year account today

Unless you purged your content before deleting you didn't really do much.

Since they are restoring deleted comments purging your content isn't doing much more. What a scum bag company. Lol

I think I will wait a bit to try and delete mine. Hopefully they get tired of cat and mouse delete game.

Same. I just deleted all my content, but not the account itself since they appear to be rolling back comment deletions. I'll delete my content as many times as I need to before I delete my account fully.

rewrite it first

doesn't help for me they rolled back posts, not that many, but still..

Kinda interesting to hear of that happening but at the end of the day, if they want to roll back my posts good luck to them, it will cost them more effort than it did for me to run a script to edit/delete

Welcome here! I also deleted all my accounts. First felt weird, but now I found Lemmy I don't look back. I don't want to support a business run by such a lunatic.

I'm actually impressed how active this place is

Going to be interesting to see how much more active it gets in the coming weeks

It's going to be a huge flood. We'll see if Ernest can keep this place running under the load

Yeah seriously. First the apps and next I'm sure they'll take old away. At that point I don't know how to use reddit with the fucking ads so better to make the cut now.

I'm grateful for reddit. It was because of them that I found the fediverse. And I too deleted a decade old history and account from reddit

I didn't have an account, but I ended up uninstalling the app I was using. I couldn't support it, even as an "outside' lurker. I'm happy to be here though!

spez is an angry little man because someone is ruining his payout

greedy little pigboy*

pigs are intelligent and loving creatures

Let's not compare them to spez

They're also delicious.

Pretty sure spez would taste like a stick of deodorant mixed with gutter oil.

Really, the best part about all this shit is Reddit could've implemented a paid 3rd party API that wasn't insane. They could've updated their terms of service and required 3rd party apps to display ads. Shit, they could've leveraged the existing OAuth stuff to limit the 3rd party API access to users with Reddit Gold.

But nah, spez decided to be a greedy shitbird.

A big fuck you to Reddit users from the CEO of a company crumbling itself to pieces.

Feels right that this was my first upvote here.

Not my first upvote here, but my second comment. Seeing the news about how spez is behaving, I’m glad I’m making the jump to lemmy. Haven’t deleted my account yet, still saving a few things before nuking my post/comment history and deleting my account

I am new here as well and I’m already liking what I see. :)

This is incredibly funny, a sub I was a mod on wanted to vote on mods and the admins stepped in and said we couldn't do it

People have complained about the "first come first served" mod problem for years. It's 100% Reddit's MO not to fix something until it's made national news and fixing it is self-serving.

He's really not making it any harder to walk away is he? The ability to remove bad moderators is long overdue, but this is most transparently bad faith implementation that I think I could imagine.

I just deleted my 15-year old account. I was on the fence because it was a part of my life for so long. I thought I’d just hang on to it juuuuussst in case. Today’s news about things made me realize I wasn’t even holding on to anything real. Now piggy can’t make money off of my contributions to Reddit. The last two weeks on here have been more fun than the last 7 years of that place.

Same, 15 years. I'm hoping reddit IPO doesn't go through, spez doesn't deserve to cashout a cent.

Spez is a greedy little pig boy with more than enough money to never lift a finger again; perfectly shameless.

ever lift a finger again

I think this would actually make him better at the PR side of his job.

New here, too. Glad to be here.

The audacity of him being mad at all the people producing and managing the content on the site for him. Seems they lost sight of that along the way andncan only see the traffic of the consumers of that content lol.

Huge wake-up call when he looks up one day and goes, "why is there no content on reddit anymore!?"

Yes, have votes to remove moderators, I'm sure that would end with no issues at all for marginalized communities.

Man is not the sharpest tool in the shed.

It seems like the absolute most chaotic decision for anyone. Any community where any tension exists will be having constant campaigning for recalls.

The king is instituting one component of democracy because he thinks the peasents will vote his way for one specific issue. But even in the immediate term this will cause more grief than the reddit blackout ever did.

I can think of a few specific communities where there has been significant long term resentments against the mods. Particularly as the mods have enforced rules on the community to avoid being kicked off reddit. I bet within 1 week, all or most of these will have mod recall votes going to remove the mods. If successful the subs will be full of reddit rule breaking straight away. The new mods will not mod.

Its really hard to tell if he just wants the website out of his life or what. Maybe buddy just needs a change personally.

u/spez is a despicable cunt and should be removed from the cesspool that is now reddit

I'm a big booster of the Fediverse, but I had continued to moderate r/Sizz, a community I founded back in 2017. I had been contributing there at least 12x per day, and zealously moderating it. I've always liked Reddit because it let me share stuff I love on my own terms. But now that's changing.

I've long pondered migrating r/Sizz to the Fediverse, and I might have to do that.

Only 3% of Reddit users use third-party apps. This was such a weird hill to die on and it's not going to make them suddenly profitable. Models of monetization that rely on advertising just don't work. Adding a few thousand users to the list of people who see them isn't going to suddenly make it so.

not sure where the 3% metric is coming from but from what I understand, a big hit to "no 3rd party apps" is moderation tools - it'll make the larger subs more difficult to moderate - and will end up costing reddit $$$$ when the unpaid mods quit over it

It was a combination of the absurd pricing for the third party apps and that the people most affected by this would be not only those with accessibility issues, but the mods who do damn near all the day-to-day operations of the site. Reddit relies on unpaid moderators to keep subs from turning into bot spamming grounds and the official app is more difficult to use for basic functions and doesn't support many of them at all.

So they were essentially giving the finger to their unpaid workforce and then claiming that the complainers were mad about no longer getting everything for free. It's a pretty hefty dose of hypocrisy.

This extremely funny interview is great but this stuck out to me

Tim Rathschmidt, Reddit’s director of consumer and product communications: An angle no one else has been writing about is the desire and frustration with users that want their communities back. Especially being vocal about it. That’s just not something that’s really been covered.

I cannot get enough of executives whining that journalists aren't writing what they want them to write

I hope if they make it so the community can remove moderators, and they also replace the mod teams of the protesting subreddits, that the community will come together and always vote out any mods they put in place.

So Reddit is going to start using scabs for mods? This can't go wrong in any way possible...

Imagine the shocked Pikachu face when they realize they've alienated the best mods and now have to pay for a moderation team.

Yes please let Reddit die faster 🙏🏻