It's interesting seeing this situation play out across different subreddits. There seems to be 2 kinds of subreddits - the "category" kind (simple, descriptive name) and the "community" kind (have a defined purpose, could exist under a whole range of names)
The moderators of all of them see themselves as somehow owning the community, but I think that's less clear to the users. To most users, r/Celebrities is a category of posts about celebrities. They don't really care who moderates it. It's a similar situation for things like region/city specific subreddits. The users don't really care about the culture, they just want someone to delete the spam. When the moderators start shutting it down, or threatening to move the community elsewhere, the users mostly end up thinking "who elected you anyway?"
The community subreddits are different - they often have a much more defined culture and purpose. Those are the ones which, if the moderators give up, will die. It seems like Reddit is betting that most subreddits are the category kind - and they're probably right. But the community subreddits are likely to be lost.
reddit has some of the worst mods I’ve ever seen in any capacity. And they’re frequently in control of massive subreddits.
I remember when hate speech was just discovered as a reason to ban people, and mods of major subreddits would find ways to use that either out of protest or complete incompetence to ban people. For example, banning users for disagreeing with a controversial decision because “I hate your take, thus it is hate speech.”
Or the constant other entitled drama like when a soccer subreddit started mass banning people discussing a major game because his team lost.
There’s also just constant nuking of entire threads and locking them with no reason other than a blanket accusatory pinned comment about how “everybody” can’t behave. Nothing better than opening a thread about a picture they took of their dog only to find thousands of deleted comments and a temper tantrum post from some mod. Or multiple pinned spam posts from mods advertising junk in like a 5000 character copy paste spam in every post that just adds to the useless scrolling you have to do to see legitimate content.
>The users don't really care about the culture, they just want someone to delete the spam
for larger subs, I think users underestimate how much trouble it is to do that job. And Reddit hasn't made it easier for mods to do that. On the contrary, this move will make it more time consuming to delete spam.
Getting rid of mods like the one linked in this post is a net positive for Reddit imo. His plan was to disable the subreddit for 6 weeks while working on a bot? What? Reddit can just take over.
Mods like this are awful - way too much power has gone to their head just because they happened to be the first to create some subreddit.
>The community subreddits are different - they often have a much more defined culture and purpose. Those are the ones which, if the moderators give up, will die.
I am in some "community" subreddits and moderators are just there to enforce the rules that they made up and not everybody necessarily agree with. As an example, it's very common to have vague rules that silence some flavour of on-topic conversations... and then they are arbitrarily enforced, depending on whether the mod likes or dislikes where the conversation is going.
In my opinion, if mods from small subs were gone, that would be a huge positive. I'm glad that this abusive relationship of mods who think they own the entire community (including the users) and treat it as their fiefdom is coming to an end. Just the fact that they are shutting down entire communities shows the level of entitlement they have over the community they moderate. Doing a lot of unpaid labour doesn't entitle you to anything, but it does indeed show the kind of person that you are.
Interestingly, each hit of Reddit drama like this does seem to be genuinely driving real migrations elsewhere - the ex-mod's corresponding post about this on KBin (https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/59559/Removed-as-mod...) now has more votes than this Reddit post, despite it being #1 in the obviously topical ModCoord subreddit, and on the front page of HN.
Not a perfect comparison in any sense obviously, and this doesn't refute any of the limitations & issues with Lemmy/KBin, but there is real traffic starting to move over there regardless.
Reddit admin:mod ratio is 1:N, the fediverse changes that to M:N. Between that and the funding model (or lack of one), I'm curious to discover the many failure modes that will occur in the coming months. I suspect instance owners (who pay the bills from personal funds) will be even less willing to "negotiate" than the current Reddit leadership.
I'm a big fan of decentralization, but the naivete of Fedi-zealots and the lack of tooling/standards is shocking to me. The Fediverse needs machine-readable equivalent of Subreddit rules, and which instances are (de)federated. The clients need to surface this info in an easy-to-use UI, and will massively help with automation, there current levels of human-moderation cannot scale; though there are plenty of gatekeepers who don't want to scale.
Money trumps loyalty (family, friendship). "We thank you for your service." It's unpleasant, but completely in line with what's happened to the internet over the last 20+ years. It has to look good for the IPO. The ones with the shares don't care what happens after that.
Subreddit was shut down while mod team worked on an anti-CSAM bot to help moderate after reddit announced the shutdown of existing tools.
Imagine there’s a bit more to the story: tools only shut down June 30th. But still notable. Shutdown obviously hurting Reddit still if they’re resorting to such measures and taking such risks.
I don't want to call it a cult, but there's a lot of stuff people will do, even to their objective personal cost, if it lets them benefit from a social perspective (be it real social value or perceived).
No one becomes a community manager because it pays well.
When I actively moderated Reddit I was long term unemployed and considered it community service (aware that Reddit is privately owned) and tried to organize information (faq/sticky/tags/sidebar/etc) and moderate to create something useful and helpful to the general public.
Looking back though, it’s odd to me how much I could personally benefit myself at this point if I abused moderation powers for self-promotion because of the sheer reach that Reddit has and the extraordinary powers Mods have. But that was never the intention.
> Edit 2: I’ll also add, that I was never going to re-open the sub because I knew Reddit wasn’t going to yield. Thus, I was prepared for the outcome. I did hope to string them along for a bit longer and waste resources, but you can’t win them all.
Mod has too much power. Give paying reddit user to have ability to vote out Mod. It is a public commercial space not a US constitutions. If I pay, then I should have power to demote Mod. Yes, this swing to those that can pay. But that is life. If you are dirt poor, living in the middle of deserts far from any voting booth, do you think you can vote even if you have rights to do so? Or, you slender anyone you like on the pretext of #1 do you think you get away scot free if you are dirt poor? Or how about #2? You can own guns, bullets and even trained like John Wick if you are dirt poor? Then how come being a Mod even if you are dirt poor get to have so much power over a squated reddit namespace you dont own or even pay anything.
Isn't it a good idea generally to remove someone in power position after certain amount of time, regardless of how good or bad they are? There is a reason Nature made everyone mortal.
It is part of a campaign based on the fact that Reddit doesn't run ads against NSFW content, so high user count subs can mark everything NSFW (whether it is or not) and hurt Reddit in their cashflow.
For some of the subreddits this isn't as far fetched as for others; /r/videos is more of a work to rule to protest given they're now taking swearing very seriously. You have to think of the 14 year old kids that use reddit.
Interesting pathetic response from the moderator immediately bringing up child porn as an excuse. I am beginning to think reddit moderation is some sort of destructive addiction
More reddit entertainment is available in the comments on these news from the subreddit's users
Lemmy, kbin and mastodon instances can interact with each other via activitypub. People can migrate to literally any instance they want, then subscribe to any community they want regardless their origin instance.
My mind was blown the first time I watch this this interoperability happen. If twitter, reddit and hackernews support activitypub, it would goes like this: if someone post a tweet on twitter that mention a subreddit in the tweet, then that tweet is automatically visible in the mentioned subreddit as a post. The people on that subreddit can comment on the post, and it'll show up in the original author's tweet as reply to the tweet. Then in the middle of it, hackernews user somehow join the discussion because someone on the hackernews subscribe to the subreddit.
Is there even value in 2023 in having a "subreddit" called /r/Celebrities ? (Or funny, pics, sports, all ... )
It feels like there should be a natural "cap" to a sub's "TAM" or a 100% conversion from catgeory to community subreddits, to limit the blast radius of spam, scams, etc and create clearer rules of engagement for the good faith participants.
Or maybe /r/Celebrities could just be a no-comment curation of top posts of actual celebrity subreddits, with a paid Redditor at the top.
Why can't mods be completely replaced by AI or bots? I wonder if a GPT-enabled AI mod would be better at serving mods functions. At the very least, it makes sense for the Reddit suits to try.
Community subreddits are better off as cozy internet forums anyways, they don't need Reddit and vice versa.
I’m a moderator of a fairly good sized sub (3M) and bots help flag things early but sometimes it takes nuance to determine if it’s something that needs action, especially if it’s for a very specific community.
There are rules that have been set up through time by mods that facilitate discussion and avoid people karma farming.
Lastly, there are also communities (one of them ours) that host AMAs or other community events and it’s us who approach people to see if they want to interact with the community.
I’m not saying mods are perfect (I myself am annoyed at ones from other subreddits and sometimes disagree with fellow ones) but mods aren’t there just to ban people and remove posts.
What makes HN amazing for me is how people hear moderate discussions and that’s one thing I’m trying to emulate.
There are a bunch of natural human behaviours that because of the way society operates one has to suppress. You cannot hit people just because you are angry. You will have to move to pursue a better life and that means losing friends (even if you don't they will). One newer one is that if you spend time building someone else's product, that doesn't change the fact it is NOT yours. They can and will take it away the minute it suits them. So either don't do it or do it and know you will never be compensated, appreciated etc.
> a segment of their website? It's not yours. It never was.
That's really not been the ethos advertised to moderators until now; it was more that unless you caused site instability (legal or otherwise) it was yours to run as you please.
You may be speaking a literal truth, but the emotive background is relevant here.
At the same time, Reddit entirely depends on these people to keep these segments of website safe and decent (not to mention ad-friendly). And these people depended on efficient 3rd party tools to carry out this form of free labor.
It is a much more delicate balance of power than what is found on most other social platforms. Some described (aptly in my view) this status quo as more akin to feudalism than to a nation state. Yeah the "land" may belong to you, but being nice to your stewards goes a long way if you want your head to remain attached to your neck.
And at the same time, reddit has the balls to advertise itself as s great place to build a community for your product or company. How can anyone trust them not to take over your community when they feel like it?
Yeah, the dude politely asked for 4-6 weeks of closure time.. hard to believe that he expected Reddit to find this reasonable. Unfortunately, the admins probably lack bandwidth to go back and forth on these things and so they just yeeted the top mod rather than tell him that's unacceptable.
[+] [-] leoedin|2 years ago|reply
The moderators of all of them see themselves as somehow owning the community, but I think that's less clear to the users. To most users, r/Celebrities is a category of posts about celebrities. They don't really care who moderates it. It's a similar situation for things like region/city specific subreddits. The users don't really care about the culture, they just want someone to delete the spam. When the moderators start shutting it down, or threatening to move the community elsewhere, the users mostly end up thinking "who elected you anyway?"
The community subreddits are different - they often have a much more defined culture and purpose. Those are the ones which, if the moderators give up, will die. It seems like Reddit is betting that most subreddits are the category kind - and they're probably right. But the community subreddits are likely to be lost.
[+] [-] bgro|2 years ago|reply
I remember when hate speech was just discovered as a reason to ban people, and mods of major subreddits would find ways to use that either out of protest or complete incompetence to ban people. For example, banning users for disagreeing with a controversial decision because “I hate your take, thus it is hate speech.”
Or the constant other entitled drama like when a soccer subreddit started mass banning people discussing a major game because his team lost.
There’s also just constant nuking of entire threads and locking them with no reason other than a blanket accusatory pinned comment about how “everybody” can’t behave. Nothing better than opening a thread about a picture they took of their dog only to find thousands of deleted comments and a temper tantrum post from some mod. Or multiple pinned spam posts from mods advertising junk in like a 5000 character copy paste spam in every post that just adds to the useless scrolling you have to do to see legitimate content.
[+] [-] johnnyanmac|2 years ago|reply
for larger subs, I think users underestimate how much trouble it is to do that job. And Reddit hasn't made it easier for mods to do that. On the contrary, this move will make it more time consuming to delete spam.
[+] [-] gonehome|2 years ago|reply
Mods like this are awful - way too much power has gone to their head just because they happened to be the first to create some subreddit.
[+] [-] veave|2 years ago|reply
I am in some "community" subreddits and moderators are just there to enforce the rules that they made up and not everybody necessarily agree with. As an example, it's very common to have vague rules that silence some flavour of on-topic conversations... and then they are arbitrarily enforced, depending on whether the mod likes or dislikes where the conversation is going.
In my opinion, if mods from small subs were gone, that would be a huge positive. I'm glad that this abusive relationship of mods who think they own the entire community (including the users) and treat it as their fiefdom is coming to an end. Just the fact that they are shutting down entire communities shows the level of entitlement they have over the community they moderate. Doing a lot of unpaid labour doesn't entitle you to anything, but it does indeed show the kind of person that you are.
[+] [-] pimterry|2 years ago|reply
Not a perfect comparison in any sense obviously, and this doesn't refute any of the limitations & issues with Lemmy/KBin, but there is real traffic starting to move over there regardless.
[+] [-] willvarfar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sangnoir|2 years ago|reply
I'm a big fan of decentralization, but the naivete of Fedi-zealots and the lack of tooling/standards is shocking to me. The Fediverse needs machine-readable equivalent of Subreddit rules, and which instances are (de)federated. The clients need to surface this info in an easy-to-use UI, and will massively help with automation, there current levels of human-moderation cannot scale; though there are plenty of gatekeepers who don't want to scale.
[+] [-] drumhead|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tgv|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] powera|2 years ago|reply
When loyalty is a facade to keep malevolent people in power, it is no virtue.
[+] [-] ChatGTP|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tinus_hn|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] graeme|2 years ago|reply
Imagine there’s a bit more to the story: tools only shut down June 30th. But still notable. Shutdown obviously hurting Reddit still if they’re resorting to such measures and taking such risks.
[+] [-] Zetobal|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] poulpy123|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnnyanmac|2 years ago|reply
No one becomes a community manager because it pays well.
[+] [-] faeriechangling|2 years ago|reply
Looking back though, it’s odd to me how much I could personally benefit myself at this point if I abused moderation powers for self-promotion because of the sheer reach that Reddit has and the extraordinary powers Mods have. But that was never the intention.
[+] [-] Tangurena2|2 years ago|reply
https://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2020/11/13/today-you-tomo...
https://youtu.be/3vzkw2zD7gE?t=210
[+] [-] throwaway71271|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toadi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] altairprime|2 years ago|reply
https://lemmy.world/post/316878
> Edit 2: I’ll also add, that I was never going to re-open the sub because I knew Reddit wasn’t going to yield. Thus, I was prepared for the outcome. I did hope to string them along for a bit longer and waste resources, but you can’t win them all.
[+] [-] oneTbrain23|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bottlepalm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Quarrel|2 years ago|reply
For some of the subreddits this isn't as far fetched as for others; /r/videos is more of a work to rule to protest given they're now taking swearing very seriously. You have to think of the 14 year old kids that use reddit.
[+] [-] testmasterflex|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seydor|2 years ago|reply
More reddit entertainment is available in the comments on these news from the subreddit's users
https://www.reddit.com/r/celebrities/comments/14e2c48/the_he...
[+] [-] sharikous|2 years ago|reply
So far I've heard only about Lemmy. Are there others sites redditors reading this could be redirected to?
[+] [-] neurostimulant|2 years ago|reply
My mind was blown the first time I watch this this interoperability happen. If twitter, reddit and hackernews support activitypub, it would goes like this: if someone post a tweet on twitter that mention a subreddit in the tweet, then that tweet is automatically visible in the mentioned subreddit as a post. The people on that subreddit can comment on the post, and it'll show up in the original author's tweet as reply to the tweet. Then in the middle of it, hackernews user somehow join the discussion because someone on the hackernews subscribe to the subreddit.
[+] [-] previnder|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ploum|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnnyanmac|2 years ago|reply
here's the same topic posted on Kbin for reference: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/59559/Removed-as-mod...
[+] [-] seydor|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shyn3|2 years ago|reply
Https communities dot win
[+] [-] kthejoker2|2 years ago|reply
Is there even value in 2023 in having a "subreddit" called /r/Celebrities ? (Or funny, pics, sports, all ... )
It feels like there should be a natural "cap" to a sub's "TAM" or a 100% conversion from catgeory to community subreddits, to limit the blast radius of spam, scams, etc and create clearer rules of engagement for the good faith participants.
Or maybe /r/Celebrities could just be a no-comment curation of top posts of actual celebrity subreddits, with a paid Redditor at the top.
Anyway just weird to me.
[+] [-] lusus_naturae|2 years ago|reply
Community subreddits are better off as cozy internet forums anyways, they don't need Reddit and vice versa.
[+] [-] gandalfgreybeer|2 years ago|reply
There are rules that have been set up through time by mods that facilitate discussion and avoid people karma farming.
Lastly, there are also communities (one of them ours) that host AMAs or other community events and it’s us who approach people to see if they want to interact with the community.
I’m not saying mods are perfect (I myself am annoyed at ones from other subreddits and sometimes disagree with fellow ones) but mods aren’t there just to ban people and remove posts.
What makes HN amazing for me is how people hear moderate discussions and that’s one thing I’m trying to emulate.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] LatteLazy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jwmoz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mvdtnz|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cr3ative|2 years ago|reply
That's really not been the ethos advertised to moderators until now; it was more that unless you caused site instability (legal or otherwise) it was yours to run as you please.
You may be speaking a literal truth, but the emotive background is relevant here.
[+] [-] lou1306|2 years ago|reply
It is a much more delicate balance of power than what is found on most other social platforms. Some described (aptly in my view) this status quo as more akin to feudalism than to a nation state. Yeah the "land" may belong to you, but being nice to your stewards goes a long way if you want your head to remain attached to your neck.
[+] [-] rospaya|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yanderekko|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Am4TIfIsER0ppos|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] hsjqllzlfkf|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] kelipso|2 years ago|reply