To all the folks saying that reddit couldn't replace the mods, that it was too big an effort, that they couldn't run a big sub all by themselves, I have only one thing to say to you.
Ever since Victoria got sacked, reddit doesn’t seem to have anyone competent enough to run community relation anymore. They probably can’t figure out how to vet new mods if they were to hire some.
I'm sure users will step forward if they care. Otherwise, it's just a campaign optimization at work. Limit the breadth of organic content to deepen the brand-friendly content and push more paid media into the feed.
Yes they most definitely will...but increasingly such things likely will not happen on the Reddit platform, moving forward. There are actual reasons that the mods left - e.g. to moderate a sub of millions of subscribers takes effort, which needs tools to make that happen - and those reasons still exist.
Im halfway tempted to start claiming demodded subs and filling them up with instructions on how to move to their kbin/lemmy alternatives.
If they kick me out and ban me I won't find out cause I don't go into reddit no more.
Edit: of course they would never give the subreddits to me, but I find the idea really funny
this would have been a good thing to do for some of the people who deleted their accounts. the ones who had accounts which could have credibly been given subs.
Admin realized that despite all the applications, there were:
People requesting the subreddit so they could continue the protests.
People requesting the subreddit so they could give it back to the original mods.
People requesting the subreddit so they could own it.
People requesting the subreddit because they have strong feelings about "moderation" and want to /worldpolitics it.
Absolutely no one who wanted to just do what the old mods did.
From what I could see, there no actual good-faith requests from people who genuinely cared about /TIHI and wanted to moderate it well and diligently. And like, who's surprised? It's a huge subreddit without a concrete community core, it's more of a content category. I don't think anyone except the mods cared about the community itself, because there barely was one.
That's the same issue they're running into with the other large subs. They're too huge and too general and everyone is just another face in the crowd, so there are very few people who care about that specific space in the way that makes for good volunteer moderators - in most cases, when those people existed for those communities, they were already recruited into the old mod team.
And all the people who want to mod are either activists for the protest, the sort of power-hungry weirdos that end up as powermods, but who showed up to Reddit too late, or somebody with an axe to grind about moderation in general seeing an opportunity in the massive unmoderated subreddit.
From the one time I tried requesting a sub there, they don’t just let someone have a sub if they ask and it’d be banned otherwise, they probably won’t give it to you if you don’t have mod experience for example (the reason I didn’t get the niche sub I was trying to revive, which is reasonable enough), or if they feel that what experience you do have isn’t enough that you’d likely be able to handle the particular sub. TIHI is a big sub, so they’d not just be looking for any random volunteer, it’d have to be someone experienced with moderating sizable subs, probably. And those people are, well, exactly the kind of people angry with reddit right now.
Reddit gave the snackexchange subreddit to someone who had no mod experience and hadn't participated in the sub for years. The person claims they didn't even ask for the position and only asked for the head mod to be removed. Reddit removed the top mod and made the person top mod.
That person had effectively no mod experience, but was already on the moderator list there - having been added by the old team.
Head mod chose to reopen under protest by turning off anti-scam bots and similar - letting sub continue to function visibly the same, but without the bot-supported protection it had used prior. He somehow talked his way onto the team during the protests, and then went to Admin and arranged to oust the head mod who had shut down the bots and was doing protest stuff in the sub.
He has since been returned to the bottom of the mod hierarchy there, for whatever that's worth.
Like, I kind of get that guy's point in some senses - simply turning off security features that quietly protect users, without announcing it, sure seems like the kind of thing that would hurt users pretty quick - without ever affecting site Admin. Especially when the head mod who shut down those bots wasn't the user/mod who was responsible for them, it's not 'their' bot if they're gonna go home and take their toys, as it were.
Staging a coup and getting Admin to put him at the top of the modlist is hyper shitty, and Admin's decision to promote someone who wasn't really part of that community to that sort of position is utterly inexplicable if we were trying to square their actions with their stated values.
If I had to guess, there are too many users who would become appointed as moderators, then just shut down the subreddit again. The admins need time to filter through the applications to find the genuine bootlickers.
Yeah I fully expect reddit to replace the moderators but it will take time and effort to select the right people.
If all the mods who protested actually resigned or moved their subs to being unmoderated it would've crippled the site, reddit would not be able to replace them quick enough.
It's unfortunate that the threat alone was enough to get most of them to reopen.
I would drop kick FB in a heart beat if it wasn't for that shitty platform being my only means of communication with some family and friends. WTF happened to email and phone calls/txt jesus.
I wish I could do that. But I'm disabled which is isolating by itself but also makes maintaining friendships difficult let alone making new friends.
So unfortunately the few friends I do have are firmly entrenched in FB and I have little recourse to make more friends. They're good people. Genuinely good people so I don't want to ditch them anyway, they've just been wicked into social media addiction and entrapment the same way many have been.
I think that was before this John Oliver thing. Since the subreddit rule also says no screenshots, but the post even says screenshots of him are fine. So we'll see ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Amazing work as always! Though I did have to check it out kind of defeating the purpose of the protest. I think the best way to achieve what they want is to just do a really shitty job in moderating. Let the entire site be over-run with scams / crypto bros / nazis.
It already is, /r/all used to be current and now it's just a constant stream of spam posts.
You should be able to block a webpage and all users that share it. Relay For Reddit has a feature where you can select "other conversations" and see all the posts of a specific link. If I could then block everyone who posted a shitty "Elon runs an ETH competition" post... There'd still be a millions others.
Nazis everywhere, Spez left #the_donald alone to grow in scope. Fuck Spez
You have confirmed my words. Moderators consider themselves "nobility" who have the right to make decisions for the rest of the cattle. That was the point of the "protest.
Ah, probably my favourite episode! I've never been a big fan of john oliver purely because I find him aggressively unfunny, but showing everyone the ridiculous cease and desist letter with "Let us neither cease, nor desist" is amazing.
The point is to hit reddit where it hurts - ad revenue. There will be a slight spike in interests as people laugh, then the lack of original content will cause people to be bored. New subreddits will have to be created and built from the ground up. Moderating a subreddit with 40m subscribers is hard.
Spez needs to realize that going to war with the users is a dumb move.
He will not realize that, because he wants money and he'll get it. On the one hand, Reddit was fun. On the other hand, it's archaic for the reasons we're experiencing right now. Progress.
Spez is thick as fuck but reddit will likely IPO and be just fine, this was a battle that didn't need to be fought.
Spez is a bad leader and his goals lie contrary to reddit's mission statement.
I left last time, I think it was the Victoria thing, and I joined Voat and that quickly went to shit. Reddit will get what they want from this which is more mainstream use.
I would argue that this whole thing will delay or devalue the IPO. Institual investors will look at this rather public fight and question his leadership. And the whole attempt at damage control makes him look bad. The only investors that will look past this fiasco are those who are doing the long play, and even then, they likely won't want Spez involved.
From a risk perspective, Reddit has just highlighted it's biggest risk: the volunteer moderators. The only way Spez will be able to fix that is to replace moderators with AI or paid moderation teams. At an estimated value of $3.4M, and a company that is not profitable, that increases the risk in terms of the business model.
In general, social media is inherently flawed for profits. The path to monetization is ads and data, and the fact that Spez is now squeezing the users make me think that the value of the data and the ads is not producing the returns to compensate for dumb ideas like the NFT project.
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