“Reddit cannot survive without its moderators. It cannot.” - The Verge

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 29 points – “Reddit cannot survive without its moderators. It cannot.” - The Verge
theverge.com

That’s a recent quote from Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler. Here’s more of it: This week, Reddit has been telling protesting moderators that if they keep their communities private, the company will take action against them. Any actions could happen as soon as this afternoon.

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I completely understand Reddit wanting to be as profitable as possible, however it's the approach to the users, developers, and blatant lack of care, respect and transparency that got my back up - suspect a lot of people may be the same. Communities always move and change, no platform is too big to fail.

All they had to do was allow Reddit premium users to access the site using third-party apps.

Yup. I was plenty happy to pay to keep using BaconReader. Give everyone a few months to set that up and I think things would've been fine. Instead, we get basically the most ham fisted way it could've gone.

Ohh interesting. Thinking about that, yah I would of signed up probably.

I'm with you. I get needing to make money, but needing to go public and become just another cringe social media platform is just sad. RIP Reddit. Hello Lemmy.

I was waiting it out until I heard mods were being threatened. That's the final call.

I'm going to be replacing posts with links to my never used socials because who cares if I'm spamming at this point.

Reddit can't run without its moderators and it can't monetize without data. I encourage everyone who's defected to Lemmy from Reddit to wipe their old Reddit account using Redact. I just wiped my old account of 15 years worth of comments and post history.

As much as I would like to do this I have too many posts there have legitimately helped people who were struggling with things.

I've had people respond to months old posts thanking me on several occasions for helping them. I can't in good conscience remove thay just to spite reddit, and I do a lot of stuff out of spite.

I wiped my 10 year old account last night. Everything except my last post telling spez to fuck off and that he and his board have no soul or humanity.

It was hard seeing it all go, but if life has taught me anything, it's that all things are impermanent and we should always be prepared to let go.

I'll never understand the people who are hell bent on trying to get reddit back. No matter what they won't have a say in anything that happens, own anything, or even have a voice. I'm glad people are finally moving to an open source alternative.

Invested time... And this place is pretty far behind a usable replacement in terms of content alone.

I was an early user of reddit, and it had a lot of the same problems this place had. There were no "smaller subreddits", everything was small. But the quality of content was good, so I stuck around. It really takes a lot of effort to build a community, it doesn't come for free. I hope you stick around and help 😀

I think only linux users moved over here... maybe

Windows user checks in. But I've got to admit, just as with Mastodon, the sign-up process (and finding communities across servers) might scare some people that are not as familiar with computers as most people that are on here now.

might scare some people that are not as familiar with computers

That's true.

Honestly, signing up was a horrible experience.

With so many of the power-users and mods abandoning ship, we'd better start a death pool for old.reddit.com, since it's mostly power-users that stay with old Reddit. How long until it gets Spez'd so desktop users have to suffer enshittification with the mobile app users?

After being a Lemmy lurker for a few weeks, I submitted a request for an account on an instance that manually approves accounts earlier this week. Just checked and confirmed that my account was approved. This was based on calls for engagement to help grow the community. While I've been here for a bit, here's my first participation. Ayo!

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I love how their CEO believes - is absolutely convinced - that launching a crusade against his product's users and mods to be a winning strategy.

I don't think he knows what he's doing.. in his mind he's running the last meter of the finish line to the IPO when all these "problems" are cropping up for "no reason" and he just wants to finish the race

Reddit is dead after this

Sadly, I don't think so. I think they looked at the number of new users and the number of users using 3rd party apps and decided they can lose those.

Edit: apparently Reddit has between 500 million and 1.6 billion active users monthly. According to RiF developers, RiF and Apollo have a combined 3 million active users. If all of those 3rd party app users decide to never go back, Reddit might lose between 0.6% and 0.2% of their userbase. I think they'll be fine...

I don't think the issue is that users will abandon, but that the site was only as usable as it was because of the mod tools that allowed the people who worked for free to moderate.

Now spam, hate, and all other such garbage will be a lot more common. One subreddit I subscribed to only had a single active mod and the only reason the sub was functional was the mod tools that now no longer work.

It may take some time, but people will leave when the subreddits are flooded with hate and spam.

Reddit will die off in stages. Slowly.

First the power users are leaving now. These are the mods and the major content creators (think Minecraft leaving)

Eventually they will piss people off again and the more common content creators will leave.

Then after reddit has worse and worse content, the users who just comment will leave.

After that there will be nothing worthwhile for the lurkers and they will leave too.

Reddit will then be a wasteland.

This will all take quite a while. Even Digg took time to die off.

It's been fascinating to watch the corporate web ecosystem that rose in the late 2000s slowly start to collapse.

I think the growth of Lemmy over the last few weeks is a clear indicator that Reddit is in decline. I have deleted Apollo and my reddit bookmark and have only gone back when a Google search provided the information I needed. I won't be going back and I think a lot of people are of the same mind.

Unfortunately for me, one of my favorite uses for reddit has been live game threads for various sports and that really only works with a larger user base. For instance, I follow the Seattle Mariners and I have found two different Lemmy instances for them. The one with the most subscribers (44) hasn't had a game thread posted in 13 days despite the Mariners having played like 10 games in that stretch. The other one has 9 subscribers, although it looks like someone has set up a bot to automatically post a game thread and a post-game thread; however, every single one I looked at has 0 comments.

I'm not gonna be able to pull the plug on reddit entirely until Lemmy gets a serious increase in users.

Hi! I'm an admin of fanaticus.social. I'd like to apologize for the game bots disappearance. It's back now! I made pinned a post about it, which you can read here.

We're working hard to iron out the kinks in the game bots but I apologize for the inconvenience. I was on vacation last week and because of a bug, the choice was between keeping the fanaticus servers up or putting the bots to sleep.

The live game threads were some of my favorite parts of Reddit too. I can't do anything about the small user base but porting the game bots over to lemmy and posting content is the best way I could think of to start attracting users.

I miss a lot of my favourite smaller subreddits too. There's way more now popping up then there was a few weeks ago so it is getting better. It'll take time for communities to grow, we can't expect it to be instantly like our fave subreddits were right off the bat. We have to remember that our niche subreddits started small as well at one point. Also consider doing some posting in those slow communities yourself to get the ball rolling. I've noticed it takes someone else commenting and providing content before other people feel brave enough to join in too. Kind of like no one wanting to be the first or only person on the dance floor. Once a couple people get in there and begin dancing others join too.

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Who is investing in Reddit at this point? I guess they can just dump their shares against etf buying.

Well, WSB is planning to short the stock as soon as the IPO opens. Technically that's investing

Reddit is not public, so it’s just private investors at this point that funded series tranches. They, of course, are pushing to have Reddit get profitable and then IPO.

I guess we will see what happens, but Spez may have totally messed-up their plans with the inept API pricing and the response to the concerns about it.

It could have been totally averted if they just introduced a reasonable user fee and license that could be used in any third party app.

Spez could have even required 3pas to carry Reddit ads - a lot of us would have grumbled, but stayed.

But Spez didn’t want that, did he? If I had to guess, I'd say Reddit's official app is even more rigged with tracking than Tik Tok. That's why it lags - it phones home every time you pause in your doom-scrolling, to log what stories you're interested in.

They never even updated the API to show ads... Like, you could've worked on that at any time, it's your own API.

Man i really hope Reddit dies and people move onto decentralized networks, in time I'm sure we can figure out how to index a decentralized network for search engines completely replacing Reddit.

It's easy to index decentralized networks is literally Google. Every website is decentralized from every other website the fact that Lemmy/kbin/Masterson sites can communicate with each of the doesn't really make any difference.

I wonder if search engines will see content duplicated across multiple instances and derank them thinking it’s SEO spam. Or maybe I’m overthinking since google is already full of SEO spam.

If the content gets great enough, that will happen. Going to take time, but it will absolutely happen. Especially with so many people deleting their comments and Reddit having their feet held to the fire with people making complaints about them violating GDPR.

Lemmy, Mastodon, and the entire Fediverse are really what the internet was supposed to be. I am glad to see the pendulum swinging back and I hope it continues. I am mostly really excited about the mobile apps being developed for Lemmy. Those are coming along at lightening speed and I those will be THE THING that makes Lemmy happen.

Moderators need to understand that Reddit doesn't care if you've been in charge of your /sub for 10 years. They have, can and will tell you how to run it. There's nothing for you to "negotiate." As far as Reddit management is concerned, it's "my way or the highway."

Part of ending a toxic relationship is figuring out that it's time to let go.

The mods need to understand that the admins see the mods just as the mods see the users.

They can be gotten rid of on a whim and no one will care

It's like they forgot what happened to Digg. They have forgotten the face of their father.

They're just looking for that sweet IPO cash grab.

Unfortunately for Spez and the rest of Reddit, they're too late to actually cash in on their 18 year-old startup.

Honestly, fuck 'em.
Reddit deserves to crash and burn in my opinion. Every social media platform eventually runs it's course and then is supplanted by something else. No idea if Lemmy is the platform that eventually rises from the ashes of Reddit, but everything from the way Reddit was run from a corporate level, down to the users was toxic as hell. It needs to go away.

reddit was the same thing as twitter, just a woke censorship mob that deleted dissenting opinions or even insinuating a slightly different viewpoint.

I don't want to be incendiary, but aren't they just getting new mods? Are the new people going to show up and wreck the place for fun?

This is a common argument that I usually see people making, there are a few big problems though with the idea of just getting new moderators. The first problem is that moderation is difficult. It's really easy to look at online posts talking shit about moderators and think that you could do a better job than them but you couldn't and neither could most people, it is a very tedious and difficult process, while there may be many people who are willing to do it there are not as many people who are cut out to do it.

The second problem is that the API changes that Reddit has imposed will make content moderation ever more difficult due to the loss of automated tools that help. People are going to bring up reddit's promise to bring moderating tools to the mobile app or to improve moderation tools in general, this is most certainly an empty promise and even if fulfilled they will do the absolute bare minimum. This is a problem because it means that even for seasoned moderators content moderation is going to become increasingly difficult. Now imagine for somebody who isn't a seasoned veteran moderator, who was freshly appointed by Reddit's administration to fill the roles of mods who quit. I imagine they're probably not going to be able to do this job effectively.

Even If you hired a paid moderator team they would still be nowhere near as effective as the volunteers who poured their heart and soul into it, especially considering that those moderators will be working regular jobs. They're not going to be able to moderate to the lengths that an unpaid volunteer could. This is also ignoring the fact that Reddit very much cannot afford to appoint paid administrators to moderate all of the largest subs on Reddit, considering that making a lot of money is their goal that just isn't sustainable.

So yeah while they could get new moderators it would not be a very easy task for them, and would definitely come with severe drawbacks. Obviously Steve Huffman doesn't really care, he'll probably try it anyway and who knows maybe it'll seem to work out short term, the new moderators won't really be put to the test until they have to deal with a large scale bot attack, either coordinated or uncoordinated. A good thing to keep in mind is that the scammers are watching this scenario, they've already started using it to their advantage by messaging moderators pretending to be administrators as a phishing attack. An experienced mod might be able to Ward this off or not be affected, but in unexperienced mod may fall for this kind of attack without knowing better.

I'm wondering if Spez is bringing in moderators from an Indian cube farm. Cheap labor, but god, moderation quality will be in the toilet.

I mean I'm pretty sure that's where many of the AEO people are from also Indonesia. I know that they seem to have a severe failure to understand English and also do a horrible job with processing invalidate reports or rejecting valid reports. I could only imagine the hell that would ensue if people like this were moderators.

Its not just replacing mods though. Take the issue that happened with that snack sharing subreddit. The current mods held it for 10+ years. They built several tools that automated verification and rating people who shared with each other and it prevents a LOT of drama and scams. Then reddit replaced them because of the protest. But what about the automated tools that they personally made for "their" sub. The owner of those tools took them down. The new mod put them back up. They will die on the 30th anyways because they wont make the API requirements and if they are forced to stay up byt he new mods then the person who will have to pay reddit for the API usage is no longer the mod there.

This is not a unique situation either. Tons of people made auto moderation bots and tool over the past 16+ years. Most of those tools break today and if the mods are replaced then those tools are stolen from the owners. If the owners remove the tools reddit sees that as protesting and removes the mods.

It's going to be a train wreck and a legal nightmare.

Even in a perfect world you are replacing mods that know the communities and have created them and worked on them for years with a new set of mods with no attachment or experience running those communities.

As soon as the threat was made all the mods should have quit. An unmoderated reddit would collapse in hours. It would have been glorious.

This is true. I suspect for many mods the power they have to push their ideas, ideals and beliefs and punish who they see fit more than makes up or the fact that they do it for free.

The sad thing is that the masses that are still on Reddit at this point dgaf and will likely stay on Reddit forever. There's a real problem of Apathy in today's culture when people are just jonesing for their fix of daily content/memes, or at the very least nothing that disrupts the status quo. They don't give a fuck about "ideals" or what corporations do or farm from them so long as their instant gratification and daily intake of said content remains unchanged.

Reddit will REALLY be good when those apathetic users are all that's left to produce content and moderate subs! /s

Let's be honest, reddit had already gentrified itself internally into subs that either

A) act like mob rule is cool

or

B) so libertarian it hurts

The B users can't stand A and the A users can't stand B, sadly, the A users are the ones who only care about "content" and don't care about much else.

Kinda sad but platforms come and go.

The only thing that makes me sad is we cannot take the years of knowledge stored in reddit with us. Some of those co tributors who posted valuable contributions are not active anymor or some has quietly passed away irl.

If reddit decides to wall their site, unviewable to non paid subscribers, then it will be like an end of a small scale civilization where poeple go back to basic living,

I hope in time we can rebuild the same kind of knowledge here.

If they’re that important then pay them.

One of the comments on the Verge article, that I agree with:

There's nothing wrong with the mods being volunteers. Reddit just needs to respect them (and the other users) more. In fact if the mods were paid employees there'd just be even less standing in the way of these administration deuchebag moves. And I think that if they were paid hires there'd be less assurance that the mods were truly interested in the subject matter of their subs - I'm just hypothesizing there. Anyway I don't think the volunteer model wasn't working. It's the admin layer outside the mods that's broken.

Wikipedia is proof that volunteers are very useful. But when you build a site like that, is better to keep your profit obsession low, be glad you are leaving something useful for humanity while living a comfortable life.

Yeah, people will do something just for fun, to profit personally, or to spite someone

The moment they realize someone is making money off it, they start getting FOMO - humans are very loss adverse. No one wants to miss out on free money

But what if they had turned around and said, "fine, we'll start hiring you guys. You'll get paid hourly, but you'll have to do the proper paperwork, be given guidelines from corporate, reviewed on your performance regularly, and you might be relocated to undermoderated subs"?

Most of them wouldn't be into it - they don't actually want to work for Reddit, they just don't like feeling like someone else is sitting back and living off their work while they get nothing. The reality is, they're not doing a job, and they generally don't want to be (there's a difference between a job and work, especially work that benefits others vs a job protecting the cash cow)

When someone does a service for you, you act grateful and offer them lemonade and gift cards, you don't try to turn it into a job, and you sure as hell don't break their tools and ask when they'll get back to work

Reddit is too big to fail, they have achieved critical mass. Keep in mind facebook is still around despite being a reviled company, and instagram certainly hasn't had a mass migration off of the platform either.

At the end of the day Lemmy isn't a replacement to reddit yet. It depends entirely upon it getting traction which thus far still hasn't occurred - we are not at critical mass yet. I hope it happens but there are many reasons why this site could fail even after reddit's admin blunders. Too many people are apathetic to the changes and not all of them are lurkers who do not post or comment.

Today you can't just stop using reddit either, especially for google searches. Too much content is ONLY on reddit. It's a huge problem. We really need a wikipedia style reddit where it's not for profit and still moderated for content.

I'm okay with lemmy getting just enough traction to bring in the best users without being "popular"

Facebook rebranded to Meta and burned $13 billion on the "metaverse" to stay relevant. So, Facebook doesn't seem to think that Facebook will be around forever. Reddit does have critical mass, which is an advantage for them. There's no denying that. But, it's their advantage to waste by being overly aggressive and greedy, which they seem to be happy to do.

As for Google searches, it might be less that Reddit is so valuable for search and more that Google has become so bad at providing good search results that Reddit became the go between. There's a lot of very specific knowledge on Reddit, but there's also a lot of redirects from Reddit comments to outside sources that have the info that a Google search should be able to provide. I don't know if Google has the will to fix that problem though. If Reddit can "get back to normal" and continue being Google's sidekick, Google might be happy to return to the status quo. But, once a company like Reddit adopts the policy that "the beatings will continue until morale improves," it's hard to imagine how they can get back to "normal."