[0zemp3c]

99.99% of reddit users have no idea who spez is and probably wouldn't care if they learned about his shenanigans

99% of reddit users are aware that moderators do some nice volunteer work but wouldn't cross the street to save them

its only Extremely Online people who care about this Insider Baseball stuff

[tedivm]

Sure, but without those moderators there's not much of a site. I don't spent a lot of time thinking about trash collection, but if all the garbage on my street stopped being collected I'd absolutely notice.

[sunflowerfly]

I hit Apollo yesterday out of muscle memory and clicked on one of my favorite subs. The posts were simply terrible. If that was the daily experience I would not ever read that sub.

[deaddodo]

So, wouldn't the proper protest be to instead...just quit? Let the subreddits get overrun by all of this spam and extreme posts and then the admins would appreciate their influence, no?

And, as a nice side benefit, maybe we'll finally get to prune the cabal of super-moderators that have been abusing their influence for over a decade now.

[nightski]

You are probably right, but at the same time there are probably plenty of people willing to step in and take their place.

[JumpCrisscross]

> without those moderators there's not much of a site

How many of those users would notice if Reddit swapped in paid moderators for the largest subs?

[evandale]

> Sure, but without those moderators there's not much of a site.

I believe moderators on Reddit like to think that they're that important and integral to the site functioning smoothly, but I think the reality is upvoting/downvoting/reporting works perfectly fine in nearly every subreddit.

The only time it doesn't work is in places like r/AskHistorians or r/science which require high quality comments much like this place. You might argue with no moderation the subreddit would turn into a cesspool of reposts and memes - but who really cares? If that's what people want and that's what people are upvoting then let it be. There's no reason to have editorial control over subreddits when the entire point of the subreddit is to have stupid conversations, memes, and jokes. If people keep upvoting and enjoying the same stupid memes and jokes why do moderators feel like they need to step in and disrupt what the people find enjoyable?

[mynameisvlad]

Considering the amount of media attention this has gotten from even mainstream sources including places like the BBC, I’m going to go out on a limb and say the number is far higher than 99.99%.

That doesn’t even count all the people that are visiting their favorite subreddits only to see them closed with a message detailing what’s happened.

[George83728]

> Considering the amount of media attention this has gotten from even mainstream sources including places like the BBC

Reddit moderators are uniquely privileged when it comes to making their opinions heard on reddit. The shuttering of subreddits is sensational and splashy enough to get media attention, but in itself says little about how most reddit users feel. A moderator revolt is like a strike of middle managers, revolting against upper management. They can lock the doors and keep all the common workers out, but that isn't evidence that the common workers have much investment in the strike. I think this whole thing probably follows the 90-9-1 rule; the 9 are mods and powerusers flipping out against the 1, while the 90 are probably oblivious or simply indifferent.

[EnragedParrot]

That's a valid point, but on the flip side, Reddit's content is user driven, and 99% of users never post or contribute anything, they're just on the site to consume content posted by that 1% of power users. Those power users are really the "extremely online" people who are angry about this. If you don't have moderators running subreddits and power users posting quality content, reddit doesn't have a product.

[badRNG]

<1% of Reddit users make the content that provides value to the site. This 1% is disproportionately likely to know who spez is and care about his shenanigans. Even less perform the moderation tasks that keep the site running, and they basically all care about this change.

[edgyquant]

Source for this? I think this is a commonly spouted stat that applied to non-social media websites. I have trouble believing social media sites have the same demographic makeup.

[AdamN]

The proof will be in the pudding. Reddit will survive but unless they back down, alot of people will leave permanently. What surprises me is how lackadaisical the board appears to be - so much money is being left on the table. I would be livid if I was an investor.

[ajmurmann]

Worse, in at least one huge sub I follow the mods are widely hated

[thepasswordis]

I think that’s most subs. This is why I’m actually torn between which group I dislike the most.

On the one hand, the admins are being absolute children to the mods. But that said: most (all?) if the Reddit mods I have interacted with are also overgrown children.

The “mods vs admins” thing seems like two toddlers screaming at each other. It’s at a point where I kind of want both sides to lose.

Something in the culture changed 4-5 years ago where being a mod went from a job where you remove spam posts, to a role where you decide what is allowed for discussion.

On my city subreddit, for instance, they’ve gotten it to the point where practically anything which isn’t a photo of a sunset is seen as off topic and removed.

And then there’s stuff like: mods will decide to “lock” threads they don’t like. There was a discussion on /r/Catholicism talking about an anti-Catholic group being invited, then uninvited, then reinvited to perform at a baseball game. After a few hours of discussion the mods “locked” this, meaning you couldn’t participate in it anymore.

It’s extremely annoying.

[e40]

This varies greatly.

Most of the subs I'm in, the mods are thought of pretty highly or not at all.

[thomascgalvin]

People on Reddit vastly overestimate how closely Reddit's opinion lines up with that of the general public.

If the last US Presidential election was held on Reddit, Bernie Sanders would have won in a landslide. He obviously did not.

When Netflix announced it was cracking down on password sharing, Reddit declared that this would be the final nail in their coffin. Instead, subscriptions skyrocketed.

Reddit power users are angry at spez and claim that this will be the end of the site, but the average Reddit user has maybe heard about all of this, and mostly doesn't care.

[marricks]

> 99.99% of reddit users have no idea who spez is

That's why people do things like black outs and protests, so people can learn who people are and what is happening.

> probably wouldn't care if they learned about his shenanigans

That's information is associated with protests, so people can decide if they care.

I can actually understand how most wouldn't care about this. This change isn't that important to me except in that's it's another stepping stone on the death of the free and open web. Twitter API, Reddit API, real ID on Facebook, probably countless other things. What we expected to have in the 2010's is going fast.

[nemo44x]

> its only Extremely Online people who care about this Insider Baseball stuff

I think this is the case for many things. And I imagine people will/are get wise to it. Elon Musk I think figured this out when he did what he did with Twitter. Some very online people really cared and made a lot of noise and the very online part of the media that cares made a lot of noise. But those people don't really matter and the media side has declining ratings year after year as they become more and more irrelevant.

I think the paper tigers are starting to be exposed and they had a good run for the last 10 years by being very online and making a lot of noise. But ultimately, their voices don't matter.

[watwut]

It really does not seem to me that Musk figured anything out. He is loosing both money and users at massive speed.