That’s a recent quote from Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler. Here’s more of it: This week, Reddit has been telling protesting moderators that if they keep their communities private, the company will take action against them. Any actions could happen as soon as this afternoon.
I don’t want to be incendiary, but aren’t they just getting new mods? Are the new people going to show up and wreck the place for fun?
Its not just replacing mods though. Take the issue that happened with that snack sharing subreddit. The current mods held it for 10+ years. They built several tools that automated verification and rating people who shared with each other and it prevents a LOT of drama and scams. Then reddit replaced them because of the protest. But what about the automated tools that they personally made for “their” sub. The owner of those tools took them down. The new mod put them back up. They will die on the 30th anyways because they wont make the API requirements and if they are forced to stay up byt he new mods then the person who will have to pay reddit for the API usage is no longer the mod there.
This is not a unique situation either. Tons of people made auto moderation bots and tool over the past 16+ years. Most of those tools break today and if the mods are replaced then those tools are stolen from the owners. If the owners remove the tools reddit sees that as protesting and removes the mods.
It’s going to be a train wreck and a legal nightmare.
Even in a perfect world you are replacing mods that know the communities and have created them and worked on them for years with a new set of mods with no attachment or experience running those communities.
This is a common argument that I usually see people making, there are a few big problems though with the idea of just getting new moderators. The first problem is that moderation is difficult. It’s really easy to look at online posts talking shit about moderators and think that you could do a better job than them but you couldn’t and neither could most people, it is a very tedious and difficult process, while there may be many people who are willing to do it there are not as many people who are cut out to do it.
The second problem is that the API changes that Reddit has imposed will make content moderation ever more difficult due to the loss of automated tools that help. People are going to bring up reddit’s promise to bring moderating tools to the mobile app or to improve moderation tools in general, this is most certainly an empty promise and even if fulfilled they will do the absolute bare minimum. This is a problem because it means that even for seasoned moderators content moderation is going to become increasingly difficult. Now imagine for somebody who isn’t a seasoned veteran moderator, who was freshly appointed by Reddit’s administration to fill the roles of mods who quit. I imagine they’re probably not going to be able to do this job effectively.
Even If you hired a paid moderator team they would still be nowhere near as effective as the volunteers who poured their heart and soul into it, especially considering that those moderators will be working regular jobs. They’re not going to be able to moderate to the lengths that an unpaid volunteer could. This is also ignoring the fact that Reddit very much cannot afford to appoint paid administrators to moderate all of the largest subs on Reddit, considering that making a lot of money is their goal that just isn’t sustainable.
So yeah while they could get new moderators it would not be a very easy task for them, and would definitely come with severe drawbacks. Obviously Steve Huffman doesn’t really care, he’ll probably try it anyway and who knows maybe it’ll seem to work out short term, the new moderators won’t really be put to the test until they have to deal with a large scale bot attack, either coordinated or uncoordinated. A good thing to keep in mind is that the scammers are watching this scenario, they’ve already started using it to their advantage by messaging moderators pretending to be administrators as a phishing attack. An experienced mod might be able to Ward this off or not be affected, but in unexperienced mod may fall for this kind of attack without knowing better.
I’m wondering if Spez is bringing in moderators from an Indian cube farm. Cheap labor, but god, moderation quality will be in the toilet.
I mean I’m pretty sure that’s where many of the AEO people are from also Indonesia. I know that they seem to have a severe failure to understand English and also do a horrible job with processing invalidate reports or rejecting valid reports. I could only imagine the hell that would ensue if people like this were moderators.
Ever worked somewhere where management got cleaned out and replaced with new people who had no existing connection to the place?
Bad mods have always been an issue, but for most places there would at least be some sort of chain of succession where the person who started the community brought on somebody they thought was good, and so on. Most places in having multiple mods would have crossover between new and old mods.
Nuking all that and appointing some rando has a much higher chance that the new mod is going to be bad. Look at the snackexchance drama where some rando totally “randomly” got appointed head mod and his first action was talking about getting government ID verification going for exchanges without asking the community anything.
Reddit will likely be able to subdue most subreddits eventually, but the time and effort spent doing so will be wasteful and publicly ugly as they parade in various mods, and have to step in to crack down on userbases bent on being disruptive.
They won’t deliberately wreck the place, but they won’t understand what made reddit a great site.
Reddit is dead after this
Sadly, I don’t think so. I think they looked at the number of new users and the number of users using 3rd party apps and decided they can lose those.
Edit: apparently Reddit has between 500 million and 1.6 billion active users monthly. According to RiF developers, RiF and Apollo have a combined 3 million active users. If all of those 3rd party app users decide to never go back, Reddit might lose between 0.6% and 0.2% of their userbase. I think they’ll be fine…
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It was just a matter of time, really.
True, but there are hundreds of thousands of people who are willing to become mods, even with no pay and awful administration.
Indeed there are, and most will be shitty at the job, making Reddit even more unpleasant to be on than it is now.
I’ll be honest. It’s hard to feel much sympathy for someone who chooses to continue kissing the boot.
Unfortunately very true!
“That’s why we’ve spent the past few weeks threatening and strong arming them. Now please, shut up and get back to work.”
Also: we’re still not going to pay you, but treat you worse. And if you quit, and the people after you keep quitting… we’re going to have to replace you with PAID moderators… and if you play your cards right and we forget who you are, you might be one of those paid mods, so uh… shut up and get back to work for free!
If they’re that important then pay them.
Or, I know this is crazy, don’t piss them off when you already make their money?
One of the comments on the Verge article, that I agree with:
There’s nothing wrong with the mods being volunteers. Reddit just needs to respect them (and the other users) more. In fact if the mods were paid employees there’d just be even less standing in the way of these administration deuchebag moves. And I think that if they were paid hires there’d be less assurance that the mods were truly interested in the subject matter of their subs - I’m just hypothesizing there. Anyway I don’t think the volunteer model wasn’t working. It’s the admin layer outside the mods that’s broken.
Yeah I was a mod. I didn’t want pay, I wanted appreciation, assistance, and to not be fucked over. I appreciated the free duolingo though. Paying me would’ve made it a job and it’d be a job well below my actual job pay rate.
Wikipedia is proof that volunteers are very useful. But when you build a site like that, is better to keep your profit obsession low, be glad you are leaving something useful for humanity while living a comfortable life.
Yeah, people will do something just for fun, to profit personally, or to spite someone
The moment they realize someone is making money off it, they start getting FOMO - humans are very loss adverse. No one wants to miss out on free money
But what if they had turned around and said, “fine, we’ll start hiring you guys. You’ll get paid hourly, but you’ll have to do the proper paperwork, be given guidelines from corporate, reviewed on your performance regularly, and you might be relocated to undermoderated subs”?
Most of them wouldn’t be into it - they don’t actually want to work for Reddit, they just don’t like feeling like someone else is sitting back and living off their work while they get nothing. The reality is, they’re not doing a job, and they generally don’t want to be (there’s a difference between a job and work, especially work that benefits others vs a job protecting the cash cow)
When someone does a service for you, you act grateful and offer them lemonade and gift cards, you don’t try to turn it into a job, and you sure as hell don’t break their tools and ask when they’ll get back to work
No one needs to pay them. Not being treated like garbage is sufficient.
If the company is treating you as an employee, they are required to pay you. There is precedent for this.
The TOS definitely gives them quite a lot of leeway there. While TOS obviously don’t supersede actual law, if unpaid internships that are clearly doing actual labor are generally allowed to exist, I’m skeptical that what is explicitly called a volunteer moderator position would run afoul of the law.
AOL had volunteer assistants. Ultima Online had volunteer assistants. The courts ruled that those were employee positions based on the way those positions were managed.
Don’t even get me started on unpaid internships.
Fair enough, I wasn’t aware of there being any precedent there. However, at least from those two cases, it seems that they were both settled out of court, so there hasn’t actually been a legally binding ruling on this kind of issue.
To be clear, I’m not saying that unpaid internships etc. are good; only that I’m not sure a court would find them to be literally illegal (regardless of whether or not I think they should be).
Unpaid internships are legal so long as the business receives no value from the intern, and the courts would uphold that, if ever a case came before them about it.
In practice, the only people who have the option of taking an unpaid internship - where they have to spend many hours a week in a workplace that doesn’t pay them, to the exclusion of spending those hours in a workplace that does pay them - are already finanically stable enough to do so, probably because of generational wealth. AOL and UO were exceptions, probably because people wanted to participate in those communities in their spare time, as a kind of hobby.
Those people are being inducted into the system that propagates that generational wealth. It’s not in their best interest to protest not being paid when they should be, because the repercussions of doing so would be being excluded from that system. So it’s highly unlikely that any real “this should be a paid internship” case would ever be filed. The amount of hours which would be ordered to be compensated, even if it was treble damages, wouldn’t be worth the cost of going to court, let alone being excluded from whatever industry.
You think those “open or else” threats are taking Reddit closer to that conclusion?
IANAL (oh yes, I do): As soon as Reddit The Company started exerting unilateral control over subreddits and their moderators for business purposes, and not legal or liability purposes, they most definitely were treating mods as employees.
I think they are getting closer to else
Should have thought about that before you started treating them like serfs.
Reddit CEO calls unpaid moderators’ concerns “noise”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOm_UKGyrZg
This is abusing volunteers. If there are 140,000 active subreddits and if 10% of the moderators hang up their aprons, then Reddit has 14,000 unmoderated subreddits. They can close the subreddits, pay someone to moderate, try to pawn them off on a new sucker, or have bots run the subreddits. The question is, in the meantime, will the spammers abuse Reddit like their mods are being abused by Reddit? Let Reddit deal with these problems. If you’re a mod, why are you giving your time away for free to a company that doesn’t care about you?
If you’re a mod, I get that you care about your subreddit, but why waste your talent on someone who thinks your concerns are just noise?
The Minecraft Devs left Reddit:
Leave Reddit? To quote Din Djarin, “This is the way.”
if 10% of the moderators hang up their aprons, then Reddit has 14,000 unmoderated subreddits
Not exactly. Most subs have more than 1 moderator.
Plus tons of mods moderate many subreddits. It’d be a much more complex statistic
That’s a big point. There are a lot of VERY prolific moderators, especially on the more popular subs.
Spammers must be salivating, like “Yes Splez! We would be happy to take over this sub for you!”
The comment is from last September, completely unrelated to what’s happening now on the platform.
The quote is absolutely relevant to what is happening now though, it just doesn’t jive with their current PR line.
Did the core business model change since last Septmeber?
The sad thing is that the masses that are still on Reddit at this point dgaf and will likely stay on Reddit forever. There’s a real problem of Apathy in today’s culture when people are just jonesing for their fix of daily content/memes, or at the very least nothing that disrupts the status quo. They don’t give a fuck about “ideals” or what corporations do or farm from them so long as their instant gratification and daily intake of said content remains unchanged.
People just need to change their attitude for how they interact with Reddit now. Gone are the days of good faith and honest interaction. I’ll happily lurk and absorb content and provide no interaction back, not wasting my time curating / generating content for them anymore.
I deleted my account, have been on there for troubleshooting drivers and other pc related stuff last week I confess. The times I f5’d reddit out of boredome for the latest dank memes or drama has passed tho. I can’t handle the attitude from the uberstaff.
I think you overestimate the willingness of people to stay in a Spam, porn, and bot infested hellhole (if you think it’s bad now you haven’t seen nothing yet), especially as public consciousness starts to realize that. There will be a point in the future where Reddit will be seen as about as respectable as an adult video site, there are people who would be willing to stay through that but there are plenty of people who wouldn’t either.
Another good thing to remember is that most of the people on Reddit are the kind of people who laugh and upvote stuff, they’re not the kind of people who are going to be making high quality posts. So when the people making high quality content leave the only thing that will be left is the lowest common denominator. It doesn’t really bode well for the continued survival of the platform, at least as a place that people are going to want to go.
they love the spam and porn
My hope is that you’re right, but my fear is that I am.
Reddit will REALLY be good when those apathetic users are all that’s left to produce content and moderate subs! /s
Let’s be honest, reddit had already gentrified itself internally into subs that either
A) act like mob rule is cool
or
B) so libertarian it hurts
The B users can’t stand A and the A users can’t stand B, sadly, the A users are the ones who only care about “content” and don’t care about much else.
There’s actually another group— people who just haven’t figured out where else to go. There are subreddits for neurodiverse folks, as an example, that are really active, and I’m trying to decide whether to post and say, “Hey, folks, here’s where to move this group to!”
I’d dare say that reddit cannot survive without its content!
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite works great for backing up, then editing, then deleting your content from reddit.
I’ve used it on a few of my accounts and I’ve noticed the following:
- You have to baby sit it as occasionally it’ll display an error box you have to click on.
- You definitely have to run it a few times, across a few days, to catch everything.
It seems that (at least for my accounts, keep in mind) you have to edit the comment, then delete it. That way spez’ world of woe backs up the edit, not the comment.
EDIT: Oh! It’s a javascript that runs from the old site so it can be a bit funky at times. With macOS and Safari I’ve (as instructed) added the link to my bookmarks and sometimes I need to click it a couple of times before the UI comes up.
I’d been using RES to overwrite, then delete all my posts and comments every few weeks for the last years. If Reddit tried to restore any of my stuff, even if they went past the overwrite nonsense strings, they most likely only caught a fraction of it.
Verge should give up on Reddit like we all did. It’s a waste of energy.
Im a proponent of just hammering their servers with mass DDOS. Follow black cats example and keep compromising and ransoming their data. And dont stop.
Hell ya! That’s the only path to meaningful change. If I knew how to do that myself, I’d take part in it.
I love how their CEO believes - is absolutely convinced - that launching a crusade against his product’s users and mods to be a winning strategy.
I love how their CEO believes - is absolutely convinced - that launching a crusade against his product
s users and modsto be a winning strategy.FTFY.
The users are the product being sold to the advertisers. Framed that way, it makes it even more clear how idiotic driving away users is.
I don’t think he knows what he’s doing… in his mind he’s running the last meter of the finish line to the IPO when all these “problems” are cropping up for “no reason” and he just wants to finish the race
With so many of the power-users and mods abandoning ship, we’d better start a death pool for old.reddit.com, since it’s mostly power-users that stay with old Reddit. How long until it gets Spez’d so desktop users have to suffer enshittification with the mobile app users?
