It's a pretty common sentiment that opinions that differ from our own must be corrupt, bought, sock-puppets, etc. People on virtually every side of any issue feel this way because it's comforting to imagine that our own opinion is the only authentic one.
Loads of reddit users are annoyed by the blackout thing and find the arguments for it unconvincing. I mean personally I think all of the blackout people should just leave Reddit. Delete your accounts, delete your comments, resign as mods. Let the rest of reddit just move on.
Given reddit is apparently restoring deleted comments, that's going to be a useless gesture.[1]
I agree with the sentiment though; if people en masse migrated away from Reddit the way they did with Digg, that would be the only really impactful long-term gesture.
Edit: Regarding the sockpuppet thing, I mean, we've literally seen that happen a number of times. When you see an account created in 2023 with no comment activity at all post, sure, that could be a lurker deciding to comment on this one very contentious issue. When you see a dozen in a sub that has 100k subscribers, that's odd but probably not unreasonable. When you see thousands, maybe something is going on.
That's the same defeatest advice people always give when you don't like the direction of your country/state/municipality/etc. you should leave/move/etc. I say absolutely not and if you have invested time and energy into something (I've had my reddit account a bit longer than my HN one) then you can and should fight for it. I don't have a vision disability and so am not very impacted by the killing of 3rd party acts but this is an act of solidarity to support those who are (However minor most of our sacrifice is). The least I can do is not complain that my daily quota of cat pictures is unfairly impacted.
I actually got accused of "arguing in bad faith" by a hackernews mod once because they couldn't fathom that a real person on this site would disagree with net neutrality.
<< It's a pretty common sentiment that opinions that differ from our own must be corrupt, bought, sock-puppets, etc. People on virtually every side of any issue feel this way because it's comforting to imagine that our own opinion is the only authentic one.
I would have bought this line of thinking about two decades ago, but between now and then a lot has happened that seriously undermined any kind of faith that the post found on the internet is a genuine perspective or, indeed, that it was even generated by a human.
I think the last straw for me was FCC public comment ISP industry sock puppetry related to net neutrality ( not that there were no indications of foul plays before ) and the fact that nothing changed after those revelations.
That said, I absolutely buy that there are reddit users that are annoyed; I will also admit that I have yet to talk to someone, who does not support the blackout. Still, this may reflect my social circle more than anything else so I do not dismiss your point.
I agree with that in principle, but this particular CEO is known for anonymously editing users comments that were critical of him, and reddit itself has a history of creating fake accounts, so in this case both are judged by their past deeds.
> It's a pretty common sentiment that opinions that differ from our own must be corrupt, bought, sock-puppets, etc. People on virtually every side of any issue feel this way because it's comforting to imagine that our own opinion is the only authentic one.
You are absolutely correct that it is a common sentiment. However, this doesn't prove that this sentiment is always wrong.
It all depends on context, for example, accounts that are very new and go strongly against the general "consensus" (as much as that shouldn't be a thing) raise suspicions. Some people suspect the use of LLMs on trying to push for consensus and astroturf. Add the name of a fruit to your answer. Hopefully they will find a solution to that conundrum
> Loads of reddit users are annoyed by the blackout thing and find the arguments for it unconvincing. I mean personally I think all of the blackout people should just leave Reddit. Delete your accounts, delete your comments, resign as mods. Let the rest of reddit just move on.
You're not entitled to the communities or their content. The communities themselves are what make the sub. The same happens when users migrate from one sub to another or complain.
You don't control what they do and how they should behave. There was a social contract and it was thoroughly broken, so there's obvious instability now.
The "I couldn't care less, give me my memes" can take their own arbitrary advice and leave if they don't like something. See how useless that is?
Lol don't forget "liquidate all of your assets to donate directly to Reddit and immediately sign up as unpaid interns, and consult with your betters/superiors how to vote in all upcoming elections".
I don't even know what to say, some folk just don't know how to capitalism right.
During this whole debacle, there's been quite a few posts across various parts of the internet that register to me as astroturfing, including a handful on HN. It's not about the opinions presented, nothing wrong with dissent, but the way these posts express those opinions just feels wrong somehow — I've seen 20 years worth of impassioned people posting on the internet, and these posts come off as poor imitations of that.
There's a silent majority - "lurkers" - that the mods have completely ignored over the course of their tantrum. I've commented more in the past few days than i have in the past few months, because it's obvious the mods have completely lost perspective of the average user experience.
Lurkers are pure consumers, free-riders. They produce nothing. They are valuable only to Reddit for their potential to be monetized.
People like to say that users who post content care about lurkers because they want to be seen/heard. No. People who post content care about commenters (and up/downvoters at the bare minimum) who interact with them in meaningful ways, not lurkers. Lurkers are the cosmic neutrinos of social media: they pass through without leaving a trace.
Reddit wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want millions of hours of unpaid labour from mods, posters, and commenters. And they want to control these people as if they were employees (by dictating what tools they're allowed/not allowed to use). This will not turn out well!
I dunno, post on /r/games explaining why there were NOT going to black out is still sitting at 0 upvotes (a in "there is more downvotes than upvotes", with comments asking them to sitting on nice few k's of upvotes which would indicate that even people that never comment downvoted it and want the blackout.
The few lurkers coming out of woodwork asking people to allow for enshittification to continue is by definition vocal minority
Lurkers should also realize that their experience is shaped by mods decisions. For the better or for the worst, that's a good question, I guess we will soon find out. But given what FB groups look like, I have my own opinion.
Should you rather care about the lurkers that provide no value to the community, or to the users that actually post something and make reddit reddit? For me the answer is clear.
The first party app/website is terrible, riddled with annoying UX and dark patterns. Also, I still want 18+ content on Reddit!
I identify as a lurker although I've made occasional posts and comments. I don't see how the mods are the problem here. Third part apps go, I go. It's that simple.
Not everyone that disagrees with you is doing so in bad faith. Not everything is brigading, etc. Some of us think that the blackouts are starting to look a lot like a tantrum that doesn't represent the best interests of the community. It is a very one-sided argument, as if the moderators are the reason the community exists. No. Moderators are unnecessary without users. It's a symbiosis.
Yeah I don’t give a shit about the blackouts and have been commenting on Reddit how dumb it is. I have been seeing the polls in the subreddits I frequent and it’s like 65/35 to keep them open. Pretty solid majority.
They will probably have no problem replacing them either. You might have to take a quality dip, at least in theory; In reality it's hard to imagine the mods getting worse. They have a really terrible attitude. It's not just about community relations either, they really, really suck at enforcing rules, so it's not like we're gonna lose quality there.
The only reason reddit continues to play nice is to prevent a mass exudus from disgruntled users. They don't WANT the mods to leave, and I do think it's a problem to embitter, and anger community, even just the mods.
Yeah before I deleted my accounts yesterday, the rate of weird pro-reddit admin comments was getting pretty high. It would not surprise me at all if they are trying to game the numbers more before their IPO, so they can claim they made the right decision.
Investors: do you due diligence! Reddit has used fake accounts in the past! :)
Well, I, for one, don't fucking care about third party apps (which make money mind you)
Reddit is/was my first source of real human information for a lot of stuff (since google is unusable now). And this blackout was really a pain in the ass
> Well, I, for one, don't fucking care about third party apps (which make money mind you)
Those third party apps are central to how the entire content works, they're absolutely critical for the moderators that try valiantly to diver the tide of pure excrement of content that floods in to the various subreddits.
That content you want to be able to see would be buried and gone, or never put there in the first place if it wasn't for third party apps that are crucial to moderators doing their work. Reddit has consistently done an awful job on quality moderation tooling. They really don't seem to give a shit, and just do the absolute bare minimum. The only reason it has managed to survive in the state it is is because others have voluntarily picked up the slack and built the tooling Reddit hasn't bothered to build.
Just because you don't see it or use it doesn't mean it's not central to what you get to experience. Think bigger, beyond your direct experience and consider how that directly impacts you.
I do care about the third party apps because they assist moderators in doing their job (which has been done for free as a service to Reddit). And more personally, they provide accessibility support lacking both in the Reddit website and app. I am not a mod, and will literally no longer be able to use Reddit as well as I have had over the last years. The third-party developers have provided Reddit with tremendous value which is now lost.
It is effectively not possible to be a mod of a subreddit without third party apps. I don’t think people fully understand just how awful the native mod suite is for Reddit, and this is what the blackout is really about: the fact that Reddit seems to want to absolutely refuse to support the unpaid labor that makes the site a source of real human knowledge as opposed to a wasteland of bots and trolls.
I don't have a third party app, either, but I do care that a business values its customers and partners... And I'm really getting signs that Reddit feels its only customers / partners are the advertisers. They've made their own website unusable because it demands you use the app instead. And the official reddit app just isn't a good app or an enjoyable app—it feels like a play for them to maximize ads & tracking. They don't have great native tools for moderators—essentially their own pool of free labor.
I know these things almost always blow over, eventually, but this has been just another part of the spiral. If you think your only relationship is with your advertisers... someday the advertisers will be the last ones you have left before they too take their business elsewhere.
Fun fact, those humans who put the info in and make up the communities do care. It's not "evil undemocratic mods", the communities in many subs voted in favor of the protest.
I love how many people who seem to complain about the blackout are like "stop whining and go back to produce the content for me".
Time will tell if the deterioration of the relationship will make that content you value less likely to exist, of less quality or more inaccesible.
I don't know. Have people forgotten that reddit mods were almost universally hated before this? It didn't matter if you were a good mod. People would consider you the enemy regardless, so I don't find it strange at all that users take this opportunity to hate on mods.
I think there's some group who's always disliked mods, but I don't think that dislike is necessarily universal.
Speaking personally I've had maybe one or two bad experiences of mods in the ~11 years I've used Reddit, and that time wasn't exactly spent lurking, with my account having accrued ~35k karma.
> It was met with unanimous wtf is wrong with you, go outside.
“Go outside” is an ironic comment, given that the subreddit blackout doesn’t appear to be all that popular among casual Reddit users. It’s popular among the chronically online people who use Reddit so much that they’re intimately involved in every detail of the site, but 98-99% of users don’t use 3rd party clients.
> I get the feeling spez is creating new accounts and posting as them again.
It’s getting weird that Redditors are turning into conspiracy theorists, believing that anyone who disagrees with the popular narrative must be a shill, a plant, or the CEO himself speaking to them.
No, the CEO of Reddit isn’t spending all day coming to your niche subreddit, creating new accounts, and sockpuppeting opinions to the handful of people there.
This is how reddit was started. If they had tools for mass posting with auto-generated accounts then why would they stop?
Remember - the top subs were being modded by epstein’s gang. If that kind of absurdity is happening then imagine when a political party offers them 10m to rig an election.
It's not that weird if you reflect a moment about the whole situation. Mods are important for reddit, but so are the users who create the content. But what power have they in this whole power? Did anyone ask them what they want and support? Probably not really, because with the subs closed, how can the mods still reach the majority of their users? Some may have found their way to other places, but the majority will remain on Reddit, knowing barely anything about the whole battlefields. So it's natural that they now will also voice their opinions, using new accounts to not suffer under the hate of those how might still have power in the future.
The more obvious answer is that many to most Reddit users do not care about how Reddit treats developers using its API. They just want their memes or discuss sports or their hobbies or whatever.
Long time reddit user and I don’t think the blackout is an outrage but do think the mods need power stripped from them. They are a bunch of power trippers and if you disagree with what they believe expect to be banned. As long as discussion is polite we should be able to voice whatever we want and currently you can not do that on reddit.
Americans (and terminally online Europeans) have a hard time understanding that people outside their social bubbles can disagree with them without being sockpuppet accounts or bots.
I think it's just redditors and twitter users, basically people who spend their time online in a filter bubble designed to keep them addicted to confirmation bias.
I think this is characteristic not of Americans and not even of terminally online Europeans, but rather of reddit users specifically (and heavy users of other systems that operate similar to reddit, or which had very biased moderation for a long time but no longer do, such as twitter.) Reddit is all about forming the illusion of overwhelming consensus; an opinion shared by 49% of users can be ruthlessly suppressed by the 51%, downvoted below zero and hidden from view. The fundamental nature of reddit's comment system encourages this warped perception of people who disagree with you being unreal.
There’s nothing new here. Socialism vs Capitalism. The revolutionaries will lose, and they should. If they want to fight Reddit, they should start their own enterprise and compete in the market. I’m in full support of owners getting rid of problem employees or even volunteers. Reddit is a private enterprise and their owners have the right to do what they please.
The difference between Musk/Twitter and spez/Reddit is that the value of Reddit lies in its army of unpaid moderators, and Twitter's value lies in its brand recognition.
When Musk took over and pissed off everyone, the only protest the users can do is to leave the platform. Some did but not enough to hurt Twitter. That's because the management (ie modding) is done by Twitter staff already. With a strong brand, Twitter survived.
For reddit, the core value is the unpaid moderators. If those moderators leave, you now have a bunch of communities with no management. History shows any communities entering an anarchy (or worse sycophants assigned by Reddit) will not last long, or at least, will stop their organic growth and decline.
except you don't need to be born a chosen one to become a mod. its not rocket science, and plenty of people want the power
have you every thought to yourself, wow, /r/pics is so much better since /u/DM_ME_BOOGERS joined the mod team, I really feel like there was a pre-2019 /r/pics and a post-2019 /r/pics
People don't even notice that mod teams could have completely rotated out this year and they didn't feel a thing
edit: ill add an example, /u/Cyxie up until a couple years ago, moderated 20% of the top 500 subreddits, their user is now deleted
Has anyone felt reddit is worse these days since they left? Is the day they left widely known as the day Reddit became bad?
Heres your answer: no one cares about Cyxie, Reddit was fine before them, during their tenure, and after they deleted their account
Is this really true? I'm not a redditor, but I used to co-moderate a certain open-posting newswire. It takes time and thought to moderate; there's no rush from the "power". Nobody thanks you for doing it; you know you're doing it OK if the users don't flee, and nobody's complaining (much).
Admittedly we were all grown-ups, not 12-year-olds; but surely a sub that's moderated by an opinionated tyrant would quickly lose users?
You can pretty much leave communities in auto mode and nothing will happen. A few posts will get blocked. A few people will get annoyed. It is both difficult to encourage and discourage people to participate in Reddit communities.
Pretty much, people only notice when mod team decides to make significant changes to how subreddit works (banning certain types of posts etc.), not the power-hungry individual at hand
there’s always more people who want to mod. mods don’t own the content. i would expect reddit to have a rule saying if a reddit has over 1,000 posts it can’t go private. there’s already a ton of mod power and they can make money by keeping clearly paid content active
This meme has been a bit overdone. I think this protest shows another angle: Reddit has been providing moderators a place to feel special and superior for free, and they are now addicted to it. Look, reddit is opening the door and tells them to leave but the vast majority DONT and won't leave. This is revealing who is dependent on whom.
Then they will find new ones. As long as Reddit has usecases, as long as the powertrip is worth the lack of ownership and poor tooling, there will be mods willing to moderate subs and feeling powerful and getting drunk off of it. 'Historically', this has happened in every social medium with moderation so far.
There's no anarchy here. Most Redditors don't care for the mods in particular. If the underlying reason doesn't move them, a new generation of mods will take place and the cycle continues.
>Most Redditors don't care for the mods in particular.
Because the current batch of moderation work well enough.
Now imagine the current batch leave, and the new ones take over are worse (and they will be worse since Reddit has shown that Reddit has direct control over the Moderators' position safety, if the actions are not aligned with Reddit's CEO. Some reasonable people will not like that.)
Eventually the remaining good ones will be replace again, and after a few generation, only the bad moderators are left.
For example, just look at every dictatorship government in the world. No dictator starts out hiring only bad officials. Everyone's benevolent with good intention. Eventually, the good officials gradually get push out and sycophants fill the rank.
Looks easier than it actually is. Here's how a mod routine looks like:
check modqueue (that's the place where all reports come). Some are fake because one user has some beef with another, some trolls, some spam, some user insulting each-other.
you work through the queue, by the time you are done users who were banned are already complaining on modmail, you take your time to read all complaints and try to shrug the threats and the attempted doxing. you get a thank you for each 100 threats.
rinse and repeat. whereas it might look glamorous from the outside in practice is boring, repetitive and tedious. in large subs you also have to coordinate with other mods to make sure there is some consistency in modding actions.
finding new mods is easy, having them stick around, I'd say not so much.
I do not care for the mods themselves, but I do care for their output - which is that each community has its own vibe and rules. Also the Reddit strike showed that powerful moderators are great for self-organisation - nothing like that would be possible if moderators could not shut down the communities, users on their own can't realistically self-organise for action like that.
The thing with mods is even if you don't recognize their value shape how a community works. If dang wasn't working on HN it would be a different place would it be better or worse? We don't know. If it's ok for reddit to reshape their communities it's fine to replace them but random mods are not a drop in replacement.
Subreddit moderators, like unfortunately usually moderators everywhere, can act arbitrarily and there is no way for users to remove or punish moderators.
So this means that /r/$FOO is not actually a subreddit about $FOO, moderated so that exactly any non-spam discussion about $FOO is allowed, but rather a dictatorship ran by whoever happened to grab the name first.
So for instance if a company creates a subreddit about their product before it's announced (which they are guaranteed to succeed at) or perhaps buys or acquires it afterwards, they are allowed to censor it arbitrarily to remove negative opinions or anything they don't like. Amateur moderators can instead moderate according to their personal agenda.
The advantage that something like Reddit can have other normal forums is the existence of an higher authority that users that are banned or censored can petition to to have them ban the moderator instead, and it was pretty absurd that there used to be no way to do that.
>The advantage that something like Reddit can have other normal forums is the existence of an higher authority that users that are banned or censored can petition to to have them ban the moderator instead
OK, so now rather then an endless number of small competitive kingdoms, where if you don't like the actions of mods on a subreddit you can just make another subreddit (including in your company example, if the company does /r/$NEWPRODUCT and removes all negative opinions people can easily to /r/$NEWPRODUCT-community and run it as they wish instead) and then it's super easy for everyone to vote with their feet, you are arguing in favor of a single total dictatorship from which there is no escape except leaving the site. How is that an improvement? Why is it "pretty absurd" that all power wasn't completely centralized?
>Amateur moderators can instead moderate according to their personal agenda.
How does going to a "higher authority" (that is going public and fully driven by next quarter's numbers) change anything here? Why do you think that Reddit the public corporation is going to be somehow immune to any sort of amateur or arbitrary moderation actions you don't like?
A subreddit is not a dictatorship. Everyone that participates in the subreddit it doing so voluntarily. Your argument that Reddit has a higher authority that can deal with bad moderators just kicks the can. What if the Reddit universal mods abuse their power in the same ways your described?
Yeah, I mean what if a Reddit admin abused their power by like, I don't know, editing a user's comment. How would you address that? I guess you could punish them by letting them continue to be CEO or something.
My favorite solution requires a bit of tech work but is very viable. Users can subscribe to a subreddit, but also to specific moderators. If you don't like how someone moderates, unsubscribe to their moderation, and their changes and actions get removed from your feed. Simple.
This ties back into how "freedom to listen" is way more important than "freedom of speech" Though freedom of speech is a prerequisite for freedom to listen. If person X wants to say something and person Y wants to read it, moderator Z shouldnt be allowed to interfere. But you still need moderation or the webpage gets filled with spam and crap. So the solution is simple, if you don't like a moderator, unsubscribe from them and it's done.
Or if you see something you don't want to see, click a button to block it, then you get a popup with a list of moderators who have already moderated it, and the user gets an option to subscribe to them after looking at their mod history.
> My favorite solution requires a bit of tech work but is very viable. Users can subscribe to a subreddit, but also to specific moderators. If you don't like how someone moderates, unsubscribe to their moderation, and their changes and actions get removed from your feed. Simple.
And then you will find out that most users don't configure their apps. They will complain loudly though. Users also don't know how mods moderate. They would have to see what gets moderated otherwise they can't make informed decisions.
> Or if you see something you don't want to see, click a button to block it, then you get a popup with a list of moderators who have already moderated it, and the user gets an option to subscribe to them after looking at their mod history.
Opt-in is too cumbersome for most users. Most users don't configure their apps (again). That's why good defaults are important.
You can't solve social issues with technology. Technology might help but only so much.
There are options, now it seems these options are under threat. A good example is /guitar. The mod was a tyrant, now there is /r/guitars. It may seem a bit silly and you may say it does not scale, but for the last few years it’s worked. Never let perfect stand in the way of good enough. For me the point is moot, I refuse to return to Reddit. So far it’s like stopping smoking.
It would be great if there were a mechanism which provided some transparency around the decisions being made by the mods. If I could see a list of all of the posts and comments which they have removed, I could get a sense of how reasonable their moderation is.
He doesn't seem to have a great way with words. If you are the owner (implying >50% ownership), you can't be fired by the shareholders. If you hold less than 50%, you are not the business owner.
If Huffman had the foresight to not speak, this whole mess probably would have blown over by now.
The API change upset mods. The AMA and these subsequent interviews have created genuine animosity that will bring large changes to Reddit.
If the outcome will be good or bad is anyone’s guess. But it’s clear that many moderators are much more upset at Huffman’s behavior than the API changes.
Under a few specific conditions minority shareholders can oust an owner CEO. Beyond board seats and voting rights, there is a duty to protect the interests of all shareholders not just the owner. So for example if the owner sells off assets to themselves below market rate it’s not ok.
Similarly, if the owner CEO is in a coma, mental institution, etc they can be ousted.
No, he can still be removed as CEO, and you actually mean >50% of voting shares, and you also have the board of directors etc. It’s more complicated than just having >50%, especially in things like fraud etc
If you have more than 50% and your actions are deemed to be against the company the minority stakeholders can ask legally to take control. Even if no actions are taken but your statements appear incoherent
> "What I'm suggesting as a pathway out is actually more democracy,"
If he wanted more democracy he would have listened more and sooner. He simply didn't like what he was hearing.
But let's not confuse things - Reddit is a business that wants to IPO, democracy isn't what this is about by any measure. This mess keeps getting worse (for Reddit but also all the communities on it) and he clearly lacks the means to navigate his way out of it.
Looks like they perfectly know what they are doing, and the plan is pretty clear to me, and they said it: "mods too powerful", to me this sounds like a government or a big company, they don't like when the people have too much power or when they unionize, so they turn authoritarian and totalitarian, Reddit is just like that, turning into something it shouldn't, I wouldn't be surprised if they were pressured by the CIA/NSA
Every day that passes I’m getting more convinced that the best move to improve the likelihood of a successful IPO (which IMHO this whole API clusterfuck is all about) is to fire spez and install a sane CEO.
How can it be that he is still in charge and hasn’t been fired years ago?
And the same message would still be sent to every user who cares: whatever value you see here is worthless to us, the owners. You have no stake, and we value your experience only as a source of wealth extraction. A lot of users probably don't care. Others probably think that's a fine and proper thing. For myself, it's a reminder and a warning.
The reminder is that Reddit is a Cthulhu-esque machine and cannot be trusted. Reddit and myself were always ships whose courses had happened to align, I have been warned that they are changing course to one I will not like.
That's all fair enough, but far from admirable. But my takeaway is that the net value of Reddit, to me, is going to be negative for the forseeable future, so my own best course is to block it completely. Others can make their own choices.
> I’m getting more convinced that the best move to improve the likelihood of a successful IPO (which IMHO this whole API clusterfuck is all about) is to fire spez and install a sane CEO.
Spez’s PR moves aren’t great, but it’s unrealistic to expect a new CEO to go easier on API costs.
If anything, a new CEO would make more of a push toward monetization. Reddit has been very light handed about monetization, charging, and tolerating ad blocking. Bring in a new CEO, chosen by the board, and it would likely be a full on squeeze toward making money even if it costs them a vocal minority of users.
It's not that everybody wants the API to be free. Like couple it with Reddit Premium and rate-limit the hell out of free usage.
Even the Apollo dev said that he might have been able to pass down the ridiculous price tag down to his users. But not on such short notice, especially after been told earlier this year that no change in API usage would coming this year.
This is just bad management and now really bad PR. I can't see that this is good for the IPO. Who in their right mind will throw money at this site now?
Reddit has never had great leadership, much like Twitter. There was an idea that you needed a visionary founder to lead a social media company,which is why @jack and u/spez got brought back, but neither have been good leaders of their companies or great stewards of the community.
Instagram and YouTube seem to be examples of social media sites led by non-founders, though those are also subsidiaries.
Do you disagree with him here? Mods are too powerful, many have decided to try and murder the site because of something most users don't even care about. The idea that because I volunteered to moderate r/subcultureX for a few years I can make sure www.reddit.com/r/subcultureX can never direct to any content forever is ridiculous.
nah. there was always a way to remove crappy mods. reddit could and would step in at any point in time.
don't mix "there are crappy mods out there" with "all mods are crappy". it's not even close. the reason reddit runs is because of all the unpaid mod labor.
reddit should just fucking moderate all subs themselves and after that they can do whatever the fuck they want. what? that's expensive AF and comes with liability? what? you want to eat the cake and also keep the cake? that's cute!
Just putting this out there because I guess I don’t know, but is it possible that most users don’t care *yet*. Isn’t it possible that the API changes could have a direct impact on the content or commenting?
Mods give a subreddit its norms and structure. If you kick out the mod team and forcibly reopen r/subcultureX, you're not getting r/subcultureX back, you're getting something new puppeting around its skin. If users really just wanted to start talking about X again, nothing's stopping them from going and creating r/subcultureX2. You can't force people to continue donating the massive amounts of free labor that made these communities what they were.
Maybe for some definitions of "don't care" most users "don't care" about being forced to use a broken app with a terrible user experience. But I guarantee you almost every user would like to have a better UX than the official Reddit app offers.
Several subs im subscribed to have asked their users what they want to do: continued closure, closure once a week in protest, or open. They respect what their users want in as democratic a way possible.
Mods are what make reddit work well. If a user doesn't like them, it's not like they're held against their will; there are other subs to check out and they can start their own if they want.
Spez is trying to handwave and pretend the mods are hated monocled monopoly guys when it's actually him, and he's just continued to make the problem worse.
It depends on the subreddit, some of them really are run by power hungry assholes who will delete posts they disagree with and even ban users for disagreeing.
I've also seen others where mods tolerate "popcorn" threads where prominent posters are allowed to spread rumors and make virulent accusations with no repercussions because these threads are interesting for everybody who's not directly involved.
The only real problem with what spez is proposing is that it's obviously only intended to give Reddit's management a way to oust mods they don't like. If this was proposed in a vacuum I'd welcome more accountability for mods.
Welcome to do all the moderating yourself Huffman. It's the task that all other social networks are constantly struggling with and coming up against laws and regulations, while Reddit had it somewhat figured out, or at least had some systems in place that are better than automated blanked removal. Way to shoot yourself in the foot.
Agreed. I'll eat my hat if there aren't a few Reddit engineers working to leverage LLMs to make auto-moderation way more effective. I don't know how soon they'll get to the point of not needing any volunteer moderators, but I won't be surprised if within a year or so they have only professional supervisors for all the popular subreddits.
> Researchers from University of Minnesota Twin Cities and Northwestern University estimated in a study last year that the amount of hours worked by mods in 2020 was worth $3.4 million.
That's not a lot. Reddit's annual revenue is ~$500 million.
Readit News
'we need to rise up against the mods the blackout is an outrage!'
It was met with unanimous wtf is wrong with you, go outside. I get the feeling spez is creating new accounts and posting as them again.
Loads of reddit users are annoyed by the blackout thing and find the arguments for it unconvincing. I mean personally I think all of the blackout people should just leave Reddit. Delete your accounts, delete your comments, resign as mods. Let the rest of reddit just move on.
Given reddit is apparently restoring deleted comments, that's going to be a useless gesture.[1]
I agree with the sentiment though; if people en masse migrated away from Reddit the way they did with Digg, that would be the only really impactful long-term gesture.
Edit: Regarding the sockpuppet thing, I mean, we've literally seen that happen a number of times. When you see an account created in 2023 with no comment activity at all post, sure, that could be a lurker deciding to comment on this one very contentious issue. When you see a dozen in a sub that has 100k subscribers, that's odd but probably not unreasonable. When you see thousands, maybe something is going on.
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/14av2z3/reports_of...
Average Reddit user doesn't care about APIs, they may not realise what it means or much more likely they don't even have a third party app!
To them their hangout just got taken away.
I would have bought this line of thinking about two decades ago, but between now and then a lot has happened that seriously undermined any kind of faith that the post found on the internet is a genuine perspective or, indeed, that it was even generated by a human.
I think the last straw for me was FCC public comment ISP industry sock puppetry related to net neutrality ( not that there were no indications of foul plays before ) and the fact that nothing changed after those revelations.
That said, I absolutely buy that there are reddit users that are annoyed; I will also admit that I have yet to talk to someone, who does not support the blackout. Still, this may reflect my social circle more than anything else so I do not dismiss your point.
I’m sure reddit will be a really fun place to suck up to big corporations now all the other content has left.
You are absolutely correct that it is a common sentiment. However, this doesn't prove that this sentiment is always wrong.
You're not entitled to the communities or their content. The communities themselves are what make the sub. The same happens when users migrate from one sub to another or complain.
You don't control what they do and how they should behave. There was a social contract and it was thoroughly broken, so there's obvious instability now.
The "I couldn't care less, give me my memes" can take their own arbitrary advice and leave if they don't like something. See how useless that is?
I don't even know what to say, some folk just don't know how to capitalism right.
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People like to say that users who post content care about lurkers because they want to be seen/heard. No. People who post content care about commenters (and up/downvoters at the bare minimum) who interact with them in meaningful ways, not lurkers. Lurkers are the cosmic neutrinos of social media: they pass through without leaving a trace.
Reddit wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want millions of hours of unpaid labour from mods, posters, and commenters. And they want to control these people as if they were employees (by dictating what tools they're allowed/not allowed to use). This will not turn out well!
The few lurkers coming out of woodwork asking people to allow for enshittification to continue is by definition vocal minority
Most people lurk politically and are just pulled along by people who care.
What is there for the mods to ignore, when the lurkers are - as you said - silent?
I've yet to seen a single coherent argument that supports this statement. Please enlighten me.
The only reason reddit continues to play nice is to prevent a mass exudus from disgruntled users. They don't WANT the mods to leave, and I do think it's a problem to embitter, and anger community, even just the mods.
That said, they're quite replaceable, it seems.
Investors: do you due diligence! Reddit has used fake accounts in the past! :)
He should have been fired for that
Reddit is/was my first source of real human information for a lot of stuff (since google is unusable now). And this blackout was really a pain in the ass
Those third party apps are central to how the entire content works, they're absolutely critical for the moderators that try valiantly to diver the tide of pure excrement of content that floods in to the various subreddits.
That content you want to be able to see would be buried and gone, or never put there in the first place if it wasn't for third party apps that are crucial to moderators doing their work. Reddit has consistently done an awful job on quality moderation tooling. They really don't seem to give a shit, and just do the absolute bare minimum. The only reason it has managed to survive in the state it is is because others have voluntarily picked up the slack and built the tooling Reddit hasn't bothered to build.
Just because you don't see it or use it doesn't mean it's not central to what you get to experience. Think bigger, beyond your direct experience and consider how that directly impacts you.
I know these things almost always blow over, eventually, but this has been just another part of the spiral. If you think your only relationship is with your advertisers... someday the advertisers will be the last ones you have left before they too take their business elsewhere.
At least you're aware of the issues now, no?
I love how many people who seem to complain about the blackout are like "stop whining and go back to produce the content for me".
Time will tell if the deterioration of the relationship will make that content you value less likely to exist, of less quality or more inaccesible.
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Speaking personally I've had maybe one or two bad experiences of mods in the ~11 years I've used Reddit, and that time wasn't exactly spent lurking, with my account having accrued ~35k karma.
“Go outside” is an ironic comment, given that the subreddit blackout doesn’t appear to be all that popular among casual Reddit users. It’s popular among the chronically online people who use Reddit so much that they’re intimately involved in every detail of the site, but 98-99% of users don’t use 3rd party clients.
> I get the feeling spez is creating new accounts and posting as them again.
It’s getting weird that Redditors are turning into conspiracy theorists, believing that anyone who disagrees with the popular narrative must be a shill, a plant, or the CEO himself speaking to them.
No, the CEO of Reddit isn’t spending all day coming to your niche subreddit, creating new accounts, and sockpuppeting opinions to the handful of people there.
Remember - the top subs were being modded by epstein’s gang. If that kind of absurdity is happening then imagine when a political party offers them 10m to rig an election.
I think this is characteristic not of Americans and not even of terminally online Europeans, but rather of reddit users specifically (and heavy users of other systems that operate similar to reddit, or which had very biased moderation for a long time but no longer do, such as twitter.) Reddit is all about forming the illusion of overwhelming consensus; an opinion shared by 49% of users can be ruthlessly suppressed by the 51%, downvoted below zero and hidden from view. The fundamental nature of reddit's comment system encourages this warped perception of people who disagree with you being unreal.
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The easiest way to resolve this is to perma ban all the mods of closed subs, then remove the ability for subs to be closed.
When Musk took over and pissed off everyone, the only protest the users can do is to leave the platform. Some did but not enough to hurt Twitter. That's because the management (ie modding) is done by Twitter staff already. With a strong brand, Twitter survived.
For reddit, the core value is the unpaid moderators. If those moderators leave, you now have a bunch of communities with no management. History shows any communities entering an anarchy (or worse sycophants assigned by Reddit) will not last long, or at least, will stop their organic growth and decline.
have you every thought to yourself, wow, /r/pics is so much better since /u/DM_ME_BOOGERS joined the mod team, I really feel like there was a pre-2019 /r/pics and a post-2019 /r/pics
People don't even notice that mod teams could have completely rotated out this year and they didn't feel a thing
edit: ill add an example, /u/Cyxie up until a couple years ago, moderated 20% of the top 500 subreddits, their user is now deleted
Has anyone felt reddit is worse these days since they left? Is the day they left widely known as the day Reddit became bad?
Heres your answer: no one cares about Cyxie, Reddit was fine before them, during their tenure, and after they deleted their account
Try the same thing on a subject domain specific sub, where the mods actively police the quality of comments. Askscience for example.
Is this really true? I'm not a redditor, but I used to co-moderate a certain open-posting newswire. It takes time and thought to moderate; there's no rush from the "power". Nobody thanks you for doing it; you know you're doing it OK if the users don't flee, and nobody's complaining (much).
Admittedly we were all grown-ups, not 12-year-olds; but surely a sub that's moderated by an opinionated tyrant would quickly lose users?
This meme has been a bit overdone. I think this protest shows another angle: Reddit has been providing moderators a place to feel special and superior for free, and they are now addicted to it. Look, reddit is opening the door and tells them to leave but the vast majority DONT and won't leave. This is revealing who is dependent on whom.
Then they will find new ones. As long as Reddit has usecases, as long as the powertrip is worth the lack of ownership and poor tooling, there will be mods willing to moderate subs and feeling powerful and getting drunk off of it. 'Historically', this has happened in every social medium with moderation so far.
There's no anarchy here. Most Redditors don't care for the mods in particular. If the underlying reason doesn't move them, a new generation of mods will take place and the cycle continues.
Because the current batch of moderation work well enough.
Now imagine the current batch leave, and the new ones take over are worse (and they will be worse since Reddit has shown that Reddit has direct control over the Moderators' position safety, if the actions are not aligned with Reddit's CEO. Some reasonable people will not like that.)
Eventually the remaining good ones will be replace again, and after a few generation, only the bad moderators are left.
For example, just look at every dictatorship government in the world. No dictator starts out hiring only bad officials. Everyone's benevolent with good intention. Eventually, the good officials gradually get push out and sycophants fill the rank.
Looks easier than it actually is. Here's how a mod routine looks like:
check modqueue (that's the place where all reports come). Some are fake because one user has some beef with another, some trolls, some spam, some user insulting each-other.
you work through the queue, by the time you are done users who were banned are already complaining on modmail, you take your time to read all complaints and try to shrug the threats and the attempted doxing. you get a thank you for each 100 threats.
rinse and repeat. whereas it might look glamorous from the outside in practice is boring, repetitive and tedious. in large subs you also have to coordinate with other mods to make sure there is some consistency in modding actions.
finding new mods is easy, having them stick around, I'd say not so much.
Subreddit moderators, like unfortunately usually moderators everywhere, can act arbitrarily and there is no way for users to remove or punish moderators.
So this means that /r/$FOO is not actually a subreddit about $FOO, moderated so that exactly any non-spam discussion about $FOO is allowed, but rather a dictatorship ran by whoever happened to grab the name first.
So for instance if a company creates a subreddit about their product before it's announced (which they are guaranteed to succeed at) or perhaps buys or acquires it afterwards, they are allowed to censor it arbitrarily to remove negative opinions or anything they don't like. Amateur moderators can instead moderate according to their personal agenda.
The advantage that something like Reddit can have other normal forums is the existence of an higher authority that users that are banned or censored can petition to to have them ban the moderator instead, and it was pretty absurd that there used to be no way to do that.
OK, so now rather then an endless number of small competitive kingdoms, where if you don't like the actions of mods on a subreddit you can just make another subreddit (including in your company example, if the company does /r/$NEWPRODUCT and removes all negative opinions people can easily to /r/$NEWPRODUCT-community and run it as they wish instead) and then it's super easy for everyone to vote with their feet, you are arguing in favor of a single total dictatorship from which there is no escape except leaving the site. How is that an improvement? Why is it "pretty absurd" that all power wasn't completely centralized?
>Amateur moderators can instead moderate according to their personal agenda.
How does going to a "higher authority" (that is going public and fully driven by next quarter's numbers) change anything here? Why do you think that Reddit the public corporation is going to be somehow immune to any sort of amateur or arbitrary moderation actions you don't like?
voting certainly ain't the answer.
that just means that the mod teams backed by the best AI bots will win.
(which probably means spez and reddit itself will just control the mod teams of all the highest traffic subs)
And the powermods will run ban scripts on anyone who won’t vote for them… because banned users won’t be able to vote in the subreddit.
This ties back into how "freedom to listen" is way more important than "freedom of speech" Though freedom of speech is a prerequisite for freedom to listen. If person X wants to say something and person Y wants to read it, moderator Z shouldnt be allowed to interfere. But you still need moderation or the webpage gets filled with spam and crap. So the solution is simple, if you don't like a moderator, unsubscribe from them and it's done.
Or if you see something you don't want to see, click a button to block it, then you get a popup with a list of moderators who have already moderated it, and the user gets an option to subscribe to them after looking at their mod history.
And then you will find out that most users don't configure their apps. They will complain loudly though. Users also don't know how mods moderate. They would have to see what gets moderated otherwise they can't make informed decisions.
> Or if you see something you don't want to see, click a button to block it, then you get a popup with a list of moderators who have already moderated it, and the user gets an option to subscribe to them after looking at their mod history.
Opt-in is too cumbersome for most users. Most users don't configure their apps (again). That's why good defaults are important.
You can't solve social issues with technology. Technology might help but only so much.
You know, I think he may be on to something there. Maybe someone should look into that for oh, say, the CEO of Reddit.
The API change upset mods. The AMA and these subsequent interviews have created genuine animosity that will bring large changes to Reddit.
If the outcome will be good or bad is anyone’s guess. But it’s clear that many moderators are much more upset at Huffman’s behavior than the API changes.
Similarly, if the owner CEO is in a coma, mental institution, etc they can be ousted.
If he wanted more democracy he would have listened more and sooner. He simply didn't like what he was hearing.
But let's not confuse things - Reddit is a business that wants to IPO, democracy isn't what this is about by any measure. This mess keeps getting worse (for Reddit but also all the communities on it) and he clearly lacks the means to navigate his way out of it.
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How can it be that he is still in charge and hasn’t been fired years ago?
The reminder is that Reddit is a Cthulhu-esque machine and cannot be trusted. Reddit and myself were always ships whose courses had happened to align, I have been warned that they are changing course to one I will not like.
That's all fair enough, but far from admirable. But my takeaway is that the net value of Reddit, to me, is going to be negative for the forseeable future, so my own best course is to block it completely. Others can make their own choices.
Spez’s PR moves aren’t great, but it’s unrealistic to expect a new CEO to go easier on API costs.
If anything, a new CEO would make more of a push toward monetization. Reddit has been very light handed about monetization, charging, and tolerating ad blocking. Bring in a new CEO, chosen by the board, and it would likely be a full on squeeze toward making money even if it costs them a vocal minority of users.
Even the Apollo dev said that he might have been able to pass down the ridiculous price tag down to his users. But not on such short notice, especially after been told earlier this year that no change in API usage would coming this year.
This is just bad management and now really bad PR. I can't see that this is good for the IPO. Who in their right mind will throw money at this site now?
Instagram and YouTube seem to be examples of social media sites led by non-founders, though those are also subsidiaries.
don't mix "there are crappy mods out there" with "all mods are crappy". it's not even close. the reason reddit runs is because of all the unpaid mod labor.
reddit should just fucking moderate all subs themselves and after that they can do whatever the fuck they want. what? that's expensive AF and comes with liability? what? you want to eat the cake and also keep the cake? that's cute!
Mods are what make reddit work well. If a user doesn't like them, it's not like they're held against their will; there are other subs to check out and they can start their own if they want.
Spez is trying to handwave and pretend the mods are hated monocled monopoly guys when it's actually him, and he's just continued to make the problem worse.
I've also seen others where mods tolerate "popcorn" threads where prominent posters are allowed to spread rumors and make virulent accusations with no repercussions because these threads are interesting for everybody who's not directly involved.
The only real problem with what spez is proposing is that it's obviously only intended to give Reddit's management a way to oust mods they don't like. If this was proposed in a vacuum I'd welcome more accountability for mods.
This is obviously the endgame. I don’t even think it would be that expensive.
Agreed. I'll eat my hat if there aren't a few Reddit engineers working to leverage LLMs to make auto-moderation way more effective. I don't know how soon they'll get to the point of not needing any volunteer moderators, but I won't be surprised if within a year or so they have only professional supervisors for all the popular subreddits.
> Researchers from University of Minnesota Twin Cities and Northwestern University estimated in a study last year that the amount of hours worked by mods in 2020 was worth $3.4 million.
That's not a lot. Reddit's annual revenue is ~$500 million.