[rjvir]

Spez is CEO because the board and investors deem him to be the best person for the job. Of course, he founded Reddit, so he has a strong case on merit for why he is the #1 person on the planet to run the company.

The process for selecting moderators is way less meritocratic or democratic than this. They merely got there first, finders keepers. The analogy for landed gentry is accurate.

[cragfar]

>They merely got there first, finders keepers.

That hasn't really been the case for a while. Especially for the larger subs like r/videos. R/news for example was created 15 years ago and it's oldest mod was modded two years ago. Also the admins come in and remove top mods of problematic subs (generally alt right/brigading subs) all the time.

[dehrmann]

He's the CEO because he was the best person to take over after Ellen Pao resigned. He's the CEO today less because he's the right person, and more because the metrics were moving in the right direction and inertia. He might still be the best person for the job, but it isn't something the board actively reconsiders unless they have a reason to.

[KerrAvon]

If I were on the board, I’d be engaged in discussion with my fellow board members right now about whether spez is demonstrating the temperament befitting a good CEO.

Even if you think the shit coming out of his mouth to be the right attitude, you have to ask why he’s saying it out loud, abrasively, in public, where it’s only going to make the product less attractive.

[JohnBooty]

    The analogy for landed gentry is accurate. 

Land is finite and subreddits are not. You can fork off and make your own subreddit whenever you like

If subreddit mods are landed gentry, then so are open source maintainers.

[stcroixx]

Good names that pull traffic by themselves are what is finite. /r/startrek is much more valuable than /r/startrek1234 or any other forked variation.

[faeyanpiraat]

This seems like a broken analogy.

Of course you can make an infinite amount of subs, but with 0 users they would be pointless.

[oh_sigh]

Subreddits may be nearly infinite, but good, descriptive subreddit names are not. r/videos is going to get more natural traffic than r/ReallyCoolNewVideos, which is going to get more natural traffic than r/asdlkajflaksjf.

[Applejinx]

Now that's a solid analogy.

[malermeister]

The board and the investors are not the community though. The community is reddit users, which didn't get to democratically pick him at all.

He's there because rich folks, e.g. actual landed gentry decided he should be, not because the users chose him to lead.

This is democratic in the same way the prince electors system of the HRE was, ie not at all.

[George83728]

Spez is the King, appointed by God (the board). The mods are landed gentry, who rule small fiefdoms (subreddits) at the pleasure of the King. The King doesn't pay them, but as long as they don't upset the King they're allowed to abuse the commoners (arbitrary bans, etc) and extract profit from them (sell out to companies that want control over the moderation of subreddits.)

> The community is reddit users, which didn't get to democratically pick him at all.

You were expecting democracy? From an analogy about feudalism?

[paulmd]

> The community is reddit users, which didn't get to democratically pick him at all.

This cuts both ways though, mods are not the reddit users either, and users do not get to democratically pick mods either. The guy who squatted the domain name in 2005 is the permanent authority for that keyword, unless there is a specific ToS violation to unseat them.

If you don't want to post, or you don't want to mod, that's fine, log off. There are procedures for abandoned communities/moderation that will be followed and everyone moves on. But you can't shut everything down for everyone else either, and you certainly shouldn't be surprised when the board operator then removes your mod privileges and bans you for disruption of service.

There is no "the community voted to ignore the ToS and allow disruption of service". That's not a thing. Yes, the service is still disrupted even if the server is returning 500, or an empty page, or your protest page. Just like when Greenpeace hacks someone's site, that's still disruptive and illegal.

Be happy you're not being prosecuted under CFAA for denial of service. If logging into the system when the operator wouldn't want you there is so clearly illegal that it regularly results in jailtime for bona-fide security researchers, what do you think CFAA would say about knowingly utilizing mod tools to cause disruption of service and then continuing after being told to knock it off?

And yes, computer crimes are prosecuted quite globally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd.

[isaacremuant]

> The process for selecting moderators is way less meritocratic or democratic than this. They merely got there first, finders keepers. The analogy for landed gentry is accurate.

This is all, of course, a distraction to divide and conquer.

Many mods polled their communities before going dark and there was a lot of support in general.

Hell, very often when mods are too much against the communities interests they migrate to another sub or sabotage it and then mods cave in.

Pretending that "mods are the evil guys that don't speak for the little guy" has to be the stupidest narrative so far and spez shows his extreme dishonesty there.

I thought he would beat the outage by "soldiering on"and letting things play out naturally, since there's no clear and friendly reddit alternative, but he's definitely coming out very aggressively in a manner that could actuslly hurt reddit and him further in the medium and long term.

[rjbwork]

>Hell, very often when mods are too much against the communities interests they migrate to another sub or sabotage it and then mods cave in.

Yup. See /r/marijuana and /r/trees or /r/worldpolitics and /r/anime_titties for examples.

[soraminazuki]

If the best person for a job is a habitual liar who abuses and defames people that helped grow the company, maybe that job shouldn't exist. And somehow, I don't think the CEO's childish attitude is what even the investors hoped for.

[xdennis]

You think it's democratic if the investors picked him? That's not democracy, that oligarchy.

But in both cases I don't think that democracy is what you want. In the case of subreddits, it doesn't matter because you can always create your own subreddit. And in the case of Reddit as a whole, if people stick with the site after this, then they'll deserve the corporatist crap they'll get served.

[edgyquant]

That’s not what an oligarchy is. It’s pretty close to the exact opposite, as an oligarchy is when the government gives individuals (oligarchs) monopolies over industries and enforces them with their monopoly on violence. Really wish people would actually learn the definition of this word instead of throwing it around in place of everything they don’t like.

Oligarchy != rich people existing and doing stuff

[willis936]

I can think of roughly 100,000 people that would be better suited to run reddit than spez.