Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge

Vent@lemm.ee to Reddit@lemmy.ml – 286 points –
Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge
arstechnica.com
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We are here now! Let's build a good community

Good luck building anything with hexbear on the platform

I initially downvoted you for the broad statement but you prompted me to take a look who commented on this thread and whether I up or downvoted them. All the comments I downvoted following my usual principles came from Hexbear. :/

That's because hexbear is filled with trolls and idiots who have been convinced by trolls that authoritarianism is the answer to fascism.

You remember /r/chapostraphouse? That community got atomized because of brigading and antagonistic behavior.

Guess where those people migrated to? That's right, Hexbear!

Do not take anything they say as truth. These people do not advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. They are bigots masquerading as trans people, for what reason I can only guess.

They're trash. Block them, vote for defederation, move on.

Who didn't see this coming?

Don't worry, I see you with your hand up in the back. I know you're only doing it because it's funny to be the only one, but yes. Everyone saw this coming. That poor fucking Snoo deserved so much better than the waterbaording that is spez.

Doing what is morally correct does not make you money.

Let's not overdo it, it's not like Reddit was a pinnacle of moral virtue before the Mod changes.

They were doing mostly okay before with premium and donations. It's just that they want even more money.

The weird thing is that if spez hadn't spent tens of millions of dollars on things that reddit kept telling him they didn't want - reddit crypto, reddit NFTs, etc - they likely would've been profitable way before now.

Yeah, they could've been profitable a long time ago if they grew the staff slowly and kept their head down

But they wouldn't be Facebook level profitable. Their investors don't care much about them being profitable, they want 100x or bust

But they wanted more money. And they don't want to pay anyone!

This is the best summary I could come up with:


The dangers of food canning were explained to me clearly, succinctly, and with cited sources by Brad Barclay and someone going by Dromio05 on Reddit (who asked to withhold their real name for privacy reasons).

He noted various canning misconceptions, from thinking the contents of a concave lid are safe to eat to believing you don't need to apply heat to food in jars.

For example, Barclay pointed to one mod recommending "citizen science," saying they would use a temperature data logger to "begin conducting experiments to determine what new canning products are safe."

It includes already-canned tomatoes, which experts like the National Center for Home Food Preservation (NCHFP) recommend against, as there's no safe tested process for this.

What's critical for Reddit's content quality is not that moderators adopt identical philosophies but that they are equipped to facilitate healthy and safe discussions and debates that benefit the community.

But the hastiness with which these specific replacement mods were ushered in, and the disposal of respected, long-time moderators, raises questions about whether Reddit prioritized reopening subreddits to get things back to normal instead of finding the best people for the volunteer jobs.


The original article contains 670 words, the summary contains 192 words. Saved 71%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

This is a cool article and all but there is no reason, to me, to believe in a mechanism that would make those new mods somehow worse on average than the old mods. Mods order was just seniority mixed with interpersonal drama with whoever was there before them, up to the guy who happened to be there in 2009.

Moderation was a sad fiefdom that was never good, these few in the article maybe just happened to have been good ones