Anomander

Anomander, 1 year ago

Reddit removed the mod team for 'making the community inaccessible' - and then have left the community inaccessible due to no moderation for longer than the original mod team had it closed.

I know the irony there is damn near horse pate at this point, but that shit's still funny every time it comes up.

Anomander, 1 year ago

In that vein, it's very much worthwhile to take the time to write a review explaining why the app sucks. It legitimately does, and I'd have been far less annoyed about the initial API change if the app they're trying to force folks to use wasn't so goddamned awful.

Then ... leave out the API stuff, the Reddit corporate bullshit, Apollo or RIF - Apple will scrub review-bombing from Apps' pages, and mentions of drama or competitors makes it easy to target those reviews.

Anomander, 1 year ago

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.

Anomander, 1 year ago

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.

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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.

Anomander, 1 year ago

That's what Narwhal dev had publicly offered previously, there's no firm confirmation that's actually the deal and I'd be a little surprised if it was.

I think Reddit chose to give them a sweetheart deal because they're the worst competitor app, the dev had been least publicly critical of the API changes, and Reddit wants the PR value of an example case "proving" their API changes weren't maliciously anticompetitive towards third-party apps.

The fact that Narwhal has struck a deal now allows Reddit Inc to say "see! we do work with third party apps; it's not that we're bad, it's that RIF and Apollo are big meanies who won't cooperate!"

Anomander, 1 year ago

Indirectly, that was some of my point.

It looks strongly like one of two things has happened - either Narwhal took the knee and has accepted absolutely abysmal terms in order to remain in existence, or Reddit has offered them a better deal in private to keep them afloat - solely to use them as a PR example case.

The only thing that seems unlikely is that they're working under strict terms of the published agreement, otherwise IMO costs to users are functionally unfeasible.