Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge

meiko60@lemmy.sdf.org to Technology@lemmy.ml – 641 points –
Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge
arstechnica.com
76

Fucked off everyone who did the work from a place of passion and knowledge and replaced them with power-hungry shills WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG

Actually so grateful for how things have played out. Discovered Lemmy, Tildes, Lobste.rs, RSS feeds for the rest. Ya, I'm over it now.

Thirteen years of Reddit and I left with the ourge. I found lemmy and anever looked back.

All hail Lemmy!

Same. It's about more than just the app to me. It felt like a betrayal of the social contract which brought me to Reddit in the first place, and which kept me there even as I slowly aged out of the main culture, as the site became a hot bed for shady viral marketing and information warfare, and then as the site became infested with fascist mind rot.

That contract was about building and curating your own experience, which was genuinely a radical idea in the forum world at one point in time. But killing off the API signalled to me that this was no longer the casem. Spez was building just another shitty walled garden, and that was taking precedence over the "build your own reddit" experience I'd come to know and love.

I think that's a good way of putting it. I couldn't be on Reddit any more afterwards and Spez being like, let's just wait it out. It felt like a spit in the face.

Same! The day the cut off the apps I never looked back. Reddit was a huge addiction.

Lemmy doesn't have as much content but at least I get a bit of a fix, and can stick it to Spez

I gotta say it has more than enough for me and it's growing

Yup. I had never heard of the fediverse and so glad I got introduced to it with the added benefit of many others doing so as well (so there is content and activity here).

Particularly the emphasis on the importance of decentralisation and setting it up right so never again do we have to go through that loss of community and platform. It really sucked in ways equally rational and emotional.

The platform of the fediverse may continue but the loss of community is still very much a possibility. All it takes is hostile actors manipulating their way into control of a particular community and then they can shutter it or steer it in a direction of their choosing. Every community on every server is like a Corp in Eve. It's easy to start an alternative but the specific community will still be harmed. But that's life.

Which is the best? I like Lemmy but havent tried the others you listed. Are they on par with Lemmy or more populated??

2 more...
3 more...

What the fucks a reddit?

Nobody will know in 10 years

If it helps give a bit of reassurance, I grew up after the Digg era, and I didn't even know it was a thing until the whole Reddit thing.

Maybe in ten years time, the next generation will be the same about Reddit, or at least, one can only hope.

1 more...

If enough people program bots to repost to Lemmy, literally nothing. Right now, reddit's only success over Lemmy is historical conversations/recommendations/tips.

2 more...

They specifically mention open kettle canning as a bad practice. My friend and I were canning something and he wasn't sure we were doing it right. He called his mom and she said she had always done open kettle canning (where you basically just pouring boiling temp food into hot jars and seal them). I guess experts have soured on the practice.

Either way, we made our cans the "right" way after lots of googling and none of the jars seemed to fail.

While I sympathize with the moderators, I would assume that historically most subs are not moderated by experts, but yes, a decrease in quality mods and mod tools will choke reddit to death.

a decrease in quality mods and mod tools will choke reddit to death.

Thanks to Reddit i learned Docker and everything needed to self-host a lot of cool stuff - without even visiting Reddit.

Exactly, thanks to Lemmy, I now face a life dilemma of either scrolling the same posts for an hour or starting my day. Fuck.

i don't understand why anyone voluntarily works for those dipshits

Because it used to be a nice stable free platform to build a community around your own interests

Exactly. There was a time when using Reddit didn't feel like you were giving Reddit the company anything for free. There was a transaction happening. They provided a platform to interact with like-minded people, and in return you used that platform, thereby drawing more traffic to their site.

i understand the idea, i'm just not sure i can remember those days anymore on that platform.. it's a good idea..

Is this the part where “it will just blow over” that Spez was talking about?

Did for me, at least. Having a "slower" version of reddit has done wonders for me. I've been able to get the news updates on Lemmy, but there isn't a deluge of dopamine hits in my feed like Reddit. It's done wonders for me.

Delete your account

www.reddit.com/r/redditseppuku

Wow. They want me to install the app to read this.

Same with any NSFW content. Lame

I ended up creating a new account with a throwaway email because my old accounts got banned

Since deleting my account on July 2, I just don't care enough about Reddit to create a burner account or download their app.

No need for an account, you can still use old.reddit.com for the rare occasion you need to read something. If you're on mobile, append .i to the end of the old Reddit URL (but before ? if there is one).

Woah I didn't know about the .i thing. Do you know what it's meant for?

Sadly no. IIRC that used to be the "compact" view (available with .compact at the end), which also opened other links in the compact view. But that got removed half a year ago, and only .i is left as of now.

Legetimately that was so frustrating for them to kill off, I thought it so novel to browse compact Reddit on an iOS 6 device.

They'll ban your new account too once you post something.

With the stealth app available on f-droid you can view all content without an account.

Its what i use for occasionally reddit browsing and viewing nsfw content on there.

What's this? Oh no! The consequences of my actions!

One of my favorite outcomes of the purge is when I occasionally look at Reddit, I'll see an enthusiastically titled post from oldfreefolk, with ZERO replies. Are those goofballs over here anywhere, I'd love a bit more of bobbyb in my life.

I’m sure I speak for all of us when I express my utter shock at this unforeseen turn of events.

They never found the right people in the first place, theres just a lot of dice rolls, luck and fragmentation.

Most mods were never experts.

They lost a lot of their more level-headed reditors as things started getting more toxic though

As with traditional Reddit PR: Reddit will comment when there's correction to be made. Since Reddit made no correction, the article is 100% accurate.

The (impending disaster of an) IPO can proceed, they don’t care about the rest. Content quality doesn’t mean squat until it affects ad revenue.

Eh, they'll sell their stocks once the IPO hits. They'll leave with a tonne of money and Reddit can burn. They don't care, they never did

None of the forcibly removed mods I spoke with have worked with or plan to work with replacement mods to pass on knowledge gained through years of experience.

None of them should. Let reddit deal with the consequences of their actions, trying to fix it for them would be telling them it's ok to treat free labor as shit (as they did).

Mass purging leads to bad outcomes? That’s not what all my tankie friends said!

Letting fascists into a community just turns that community into a community of fascists. This isn't new information. But maybe you're fine with that.

Even your username sounds irony poisoned in a techbro way. cringe

irony poisoned in a techbro way

Well that’s certainly unique

When some credulous techbro babbles about "free speech" they either ignore or like the cryptofascist and kiddie creeping shit that pours through if there's no filter system.

For real? You're really suggesting that anybody who says they're for free speech is actually a fascist pedophile?

4 more...
4 more...

Companies seem to over estimate how many people are willing to do certain kinds of work.

Did Spaz think a thousand mods were just waiting in the wings that would not have similar concerns as the first group?

He unironically probably did.

He also modded the jailbait subreddit, in case you were unaware.

A real stand up guy

Reddit has quality content?

Aside from sports subreddits, the content quality on the website has been trash for as long as I can remember. After the latest fiasco, you get a mixture of years old memes and incel nonsense like subreddits rating the attractiveness of random woman appearing on r/all and r/popular. The boosting of that last example, which I can only guess is an indirect consequence of the subreddit blackout, is honestly just gross.

It saddens me that this same post on the reddit instance is more poplar than this one posted at the same time.

I've recently found reddit less engaging. I used to post on various communities about interests of mine, but at the end of the day I can't deny reddit is a profit based model which is ok all in all, but it really leaves a bad impression for the end user who just wants to get along in a community with like-minded individuals. And that is the very aspect that used to make it a great place for end users. Contrary to twitter or youtube that incorporate recommendation algorithms, reddit and similar sites expect users to find their communities on their own and contribute on them altogether without the intervention of some centralized algorithm. The way in which it has evicted unofficial clients is quite a shame in that regard ; it makes the platform more aggressive towards users.

I was just permanently banned from Reddit for like the 5th time. After like 20 years I think i finally called it quits!

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!

Makes me wonder if the same problem exists on Lemmy and KBin, given the fact that they were hastily populated as a reaction to Reddit screwing up.

Maybe you should UNBAN PEOPLE, like ME MAYBE!?!?!

Seriously they're basically Gazpacho in that one episode of Chowder