Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators From Subreddits Continuing Apollo-Related Blackouts - MacRumors
macrumors.com
In a comment shared by r/Apple moderator @aaronp613, Reddit cited its Moderator Code of Conduct and said that it has a duty to keep communities "relied upon by thousands or even millions of users" operational. Mods who do not agree to reopen subreddits that have gone private will be removed.
If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team.
that was faster than I expected tbh
what it tells me is that it's finally having a financial impact
Strikes work.
Breaking strikes also works, unfortunately. Look at Air Traffic Controllers with Reagan, or the Pinkertons back in the late 19th century. If there's a way to force compliance, they will. And there is.
Difference here is, I don't rely on reddit for income and have nothing to lose. They do.
That's not really the point, though. A strike works because the strikers are willing to lose their pay to force action. If the strikers can be replaced, then the strikers lose.
What you're saying is true: the strikers in this case have nothing to lose.... except their partial control of Reddit. And Reddit will gladly take that from them.
Once the subs are reopened, any ongoing strike will amount to angry people with no power shouting into the void.
Can they really be replaced, though? There aren't an infinite number of people willing to do shitty internet janitorial work for free. You generally get two types of people to fill that role, those who are passionate about the subject and those who like having control.
The passionate ones are rare and special, they make a community good. They'll go away. The power-hungry ones might stick around. But they'll make the subs worse, and they're now serving at the whim of Reddit so they might not be so happy with that kind of "power" either. They could have so much more power - the power of the
godsadmins themselves - if they were to run their own instance on the Fediverse.Reddit may find enough scabs to keep the lights on, but if this was really a cost-free solution to Reddit's problem they would have done it ages ago.
They can throw money at it until it works out. Mods do good things, but the bulk of the work is relatively mindless, and easy to outsource.
Money is the whole reason they're doing any of this, though. The more money this debacle costs them the worse it is for them. They just laid off 5% of their staff, and now they're going to have to hire paid moderators?
They might have to contract some janitors temporarily.
They can afford it. It will keep things running smoothly until volunteer mods are sourced.
Also, the reason they are shutting down third party apps is control. Bottom line is money, but indirectly. They want everyone using their app or their web interface so they can harvest the most data and sell the best ads.
My guess is, that they‘ll wait as long as possible to pay mods. This would set a precedent for the whole platform.
They can't be replaced in this case - unless Reddit wants to spend lots of $$$ hiring moderators. As long as they leave that power to community mods, it is impossible for them to stop this type of protest.
I do think there is a real possibility Reddit will consider this a long-term risk and replace them with paid mods.
can reddit actually afford to pay mods though? mods that can do the same level of work as the current, unpaid mods are doing right now?
if they cant then the strike/protest is successful
They wouldn't want to pay someone to run communities, the "thinking" work that moderators do.
They won't mind paying call-center-level employees/contractors to do the janitor work, the "unthinking" work, which is voluminous.
They only have to do it until more mods come on board.
And don't forget they already have a lot of mods from subs that didn't blackout at all, and likely some from subs that already reopened.
It will not be hard or too terribly expensive for them to keep things running well enough that the masses are placated.
You'd hate to see disgruntled former users fill the subs with trash and unhelpful information. That would take a lot of work to police and repair.
The Pinkertons are still around, and still being engaged by companies. Just a few months ago Wizards of the Coast (publishers of Magic the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons) were caught using them to intimidate someone who had accidentally-but-legally received unreleased Magic cards into handing over the property.
Yeah, but it will cost them money that they're not going to earn back.
It will prevent a catastrophic exodus like Digg experienced. Any amount spent it well worth it.
It most certainly is working.
Classic strikebusting. "Oh you won't work for an increasingly bad shake? Guess I'll put these scabs in place instead."
What's stopping the entire mod team from nuking the sub? They can remove all formatting, ban the entire userbase and remove all mod bots.
Rollback on to a backup probably
And then Reddit restores from backup.
and opens themselves to brigading.
At this point I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit has put rate-limiting in place to prevent mass actions like that.
Normally I wouldn't give their engineers enough credit to figure something like that out, but in this case rate-limiting already exists for posts, comments, chat, etc.
They're digging their own graves.
Digg, get it?
Diggit
freenode, twitter, reddit. shit like this is always a sign of the end
You mean a heavy handed approach and forcing your will on voluntary participants of your social media platform is bad for business?!?!
This makes me think the protests are having more of an impact than they are admitting. Gotta be feeling a hit financially withs ads to make this sort of move this early. Oh well fuck em. Only reason I've visited in the past week was to nuke my 16 year old account.
reddit has a duty to keep subreddits open if they dont want their IPO to die in a fire.
reddit does not give a flying fuck about their users - it hasnt for quite some time.
stay private/blacked out for eternity, let that platform collapse.
Flash forward 8-10 months and the news post reads: “After catastrophic exodus Reddit asks to join the #fediverse to add content to platform in hopes of salvaging doomed IPO”
They don't need to ask to join.
This actually will probably happen down the line. And reddit will only keep its user base if they provide a better ui.
Lmao there's no way reddit figures out how to make a ui. They're doomed if the fediverse keeps growing
Honestly, Reddit is likely to keep on trucking with a decent sized user base no matter what. A massive number of people aren't gonna leave, if for nothing but simply not wanting to have to change. I think the most likely thing that happens is that Reddit loses a small chunk of people, their growth heavily slows due to competition and a slow trickle of people leaving (but likely offset by the network effect still favouring them for new people), and they take a revenue ding because advertisers aren't gonna like all this drama.
The Fediverse will probably have a bit more rapid growth as the blackouts still continue in some subs and more people become aware of alternatives to Reddit, but then just grows slowly, with usability being the big barrier to massive adoption.
Mostly power users will leave for something else, which in turn leads to worse content on Reddit.
power users and mods leaving. The big key is how moderation continues on reddit. whether the scab mods and those that stayed are able to control the bots and spam or not. if they can, then reddit continues mostly as normal.
Probably the most realistic comment here. Changes may come, quality may decline, but reddit is here to stay
Reddit spent years coming up with the shitty new.reddit UI. By the time they improve it again, humans would have landed on Mars
But the instances need to allow their participation and many will not without a hat in hand.
And within hours, most instances will have preemptively defederated from it.
Puts for days on Reddit.
Didn't they already put a scab in r/adviceanimals?
Yes, they installed a new head mod and the new head mod bans anyone who brings it up. The new mod is a moderator of 106 different subreddits.
The funny thing is that many people remaining on reddit have been praising the admins for threatening to remove mods, because they hate the power mods who control all the subs and want to see them removed, but that's exactly who reddit is using to replace the mods they dislike.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if some of these moderators are actually PR Firms or similar.
No. The short story there was an inactive mod was top mod and came back just to make the whole sub private and got backlash from the most active mod about it. Admins ended up removing the inactive mod. There is additional back and forth between the two that got posted but it basically ends as the one actually doing the work gained full control.
Yea but cedarwolf is online 24/7. Fucking scary powermod
They have two options: either hire someone and pay them to mod subreddits or open positions to (even more then currently) unreliable powertripping users who will destroy the platform.
I'm fine with both options. I'm not going back, btw.
That's the thing, they are pissing on people that do unpaid, free modding. Reddit relies on free workers and that means you have to show appreciation, not piss on them. The next batch sees it and guess what they won't step up.
Mods don't have a duty to do shit, Reddit doesn't pay them anything, doesn't even offer premium at a discount or anything.
Maybe if Reddit was more concerned with not creating a toxic hellspace, they wouldn't need to rely on volunteers to keep their billion dollar corporation running smoothly. Everything about this pisses me off so fucking bad.
Where do they get off saying mods have a DUTY to them, when they LITERALLY are volunteers and reddit gives them nothing.
And maybe if Reddit wasn't killing third party mod tools......like the moderation still isn't gonna be the same no matter how many people you appoint bc you killed the tools that made it possible.
At least it'll fall apart entirely once they appoint kids who desperately want to be Reddit mods after no one else will do it. If they want to run every subreddit themselves, they can, but it will only hurt them immensely.
But it offers them a tiny bit of power, via being a internet janitor. I'm certain that there's a decent amount of people who will jump at the opportunity to become a moderator of a large subreddit. They are obviously the worst people to wield such power - just like anyone in the real world who seeks power is least likely to use it for good.
Moderation will be low quality, but it will remove spam. As long as the content mill keeps running all is fine. Users of the tiktokified official Reddit app won't even notice a thing.
If your looking to become a mod for power, sorry the position is not for you
If your platform depends on the labor of unpaid volunteers, threatening them is not only super shitty, it's also generally a really bad idea
Fuck /u/spez
If you strike us down we will become more powerful than you can imagine...
Whatever this turns out to be it will establish a precedent that all social media conglomerates will set the bar at.
surprising absolutely nobody....
There is no way I'm going back to Reddit, the higher ups are greedy and scummy people. Hope the moderator's they change to end up creating a toxic cess pool and bring them down with it.
Let them do it, only pushes more people to alternatives.
I wish, but I've seen a bunch of redditors in the last few days say they didn't even know 3rd party apps existed. Even complaining about the blackouts how all it's doing is hurting the users. Idk if those are bots, paid comments, or what, but I'm sure a lot of people actually think that and it's sooo frustrating.
Plenty of newer reddit users legitimately think reddit itself is just an app and have no clue there's even a desktop site. I've blown some minds when I mentioned the fact that I'd been using the best third party app RiF for over a decade and used old reddit on desktop.
then they shall remain in the blackest ocean abyss with lidless eyes forever staring at the dark. ignorant and doomed despite their eternal vigilance
It won’t happen overnight. Reddit will be slowly bleeding users in the coming months and after lemmyverse reaches critical mass, there will be no going back.
It might push more power users away. It won't push away the teeming masses.
Quality will suffer, but they'll keep their traffic.
Yeah but there will still be decay. The teeming masses are there to see what the power users are doing. A dip in content quality will lead to a migration like what came a couple years after the Digg migration when the Stumbleupon folks needed a new home
I can live with that. Actually, I would be happy with that if that means those power users will be coming here.
Wow! So Reddit is actively stealing the work of creators. It's even worse than I had imagined. I am very glad that I have left the platform now!
Redditors should scorch earth their content contributions. That way u/spez replacing the mods is only going to result in an open but crippled subreddit.
There are tools to help. The best recommended ones I know of:
A Rust CLI app: https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit/
A JavaScript bookmarklet (that feels a bit like a full browser extension): https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
Used power delete suite last night. Worked like a charm. Sucked scorching my almost 8 year account, but they can eat shit.
I did the same with my two accounts at 7 and 8 years old (neither match this username).
One of them is a novelty account, I wonder if I can sell it 🤔
I did the same with my 11 year old account. On one hand it hurts, but on the other it feels so good
Same, watching the progress bars deleting all of my comments hurt a bit. But that just made me realize how dumb it is to have an attachment to some random account.
I'm deleting the entire account when the API changes go live. Fediverse link aggregation services are good enough and people constantly crosspost popular topics from Reddit.
Imagine trying to go public and creating this firestorm right before doing it. Complete incompetence.
I don't get why mods haven't at least made sticky threads in every sub where they simply ask users to use uBlock Origin to block all Reddit ads and to check out backup communities on Lemmy?
Really good point here, that just makes somuch sense
Well, there you have it. The "we only care about money" we were waiting for /s. Expect changes to increase profit to affect users even more than this, reddit as we knew it is dead
Imagine being the only mod in a large subreddit, leading an army of untrained recruits. What does that mean for the health of that community? The quality of the subjects and posts isn't going to be very good, particularly if people start birigading or something.
They are getting rid of their best volunteers.
They don't care, they just want the community to be open so that they can have the most content the users can scroll through while seeing their precious ads.
Value of the content doesn't really matter i guess...
I saw another post saying they vowed not to do that. I haven't read the interview, but I wonder how what he said could be interpreted in opposite ways by two different people.
Anyone saying that they wouldn't was lying. Spez has a history of lying.
Here's what they said on June 7:
https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/143rk5p/-/jnbjtsc/
Reddit will do whatever it takes for them. It is unfortunate but not a giant shock.
I'm gonna laugh my ass of in the end of these hostile mod removals, they end up paying them and their now reddit employees with a union..
We were all expecting that, I’m surprised that they didn’t do it earlier.
The answer imo to this is to add people as approved posters and keep the subreddit going.
Can't say I'm surprised.
They did say that they would do it, after all.
No this was literally just a part of the contingency plan.
The whole point of their API change is literally to push out anyone even mildly tech-savvy, and keep all the people who blindly just scroll through posts and consume the ads just like other content.