In a comment shared by r/Apple moderator @aaronp613, Reddit cited its Moderator Code of Conduct and said that it has a duty to keep communities “relied upon by thousands or even millions of users” operational. Mods who do not agree to reopen subreddits that have gone private will be removed.
If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team.
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that was faster than I expected tbh
what it tells me is that it’s finally having a financial impact
Strikes work.
Breaking strikes also works, unfortunately. Look at Air Traffic Controllers with Reagan, or the Pinkertons back in the late 19th century. If there’s a way to force compliance, they will. And there is.
Difference here is, I don’t rely on reddit for income and have nothing to lose. They do.
That’s not really the point, though. A strike works because the strikers are willing to lose their pay to force action. If the strikers can be replaced, then the strikers lose.
What you’re saying is true: the strikers in this case have nothing to lose… except their partial control of Reddit. And Reddit will gladly take that from them.
Once the subs are reopened, any ongoing strike will amount to angry people with no power shouting into the void.
can reddit actually afford to pay mods though? mods that can do the same level of work as the current, unpaid mods are doing right now?
if they cant then the strike/protest is successful
They wouldn’t want to pay someone to run communities, the “thinking” work that moderators do.
They won’t mind paying call-center-level employees/contractors to do the janitor work, the “unthinking” work, which is voluminous.
They only have to do it until more mods come on board.
And don’t forget they already have a lot of mods from subs that didn’t blackout at all, and likely some from subs that already reopened.
It will not be hard or too terribly expensive for them to keep things running well enough that the masses are placated.
They can’t be replaced in this case - unless Reddit wants to spend lots of $$$ hiring moderators. As long as they leave that power to community mods, it is impossible for them to stop this type of protest.
I do think there is a real possibility Reddit will consider this a long-term risk and replace them with paid mods.
Can they really be replaced, though? There aren’t an infinite number of people willing to do shitty internet janitorial work for free. You generally get two types of people to fill that role, those who are passionate about the subject and those who like having control.
The passionate ones are rare and special, they make a community good. They’ll go away. The power-hungry ones might stick around. But they’ll make the subs worse, and they’re now serving at the whim of Reddit so they might not be so happy with that kind of “power” either. They could have so much more power - the power of the
godsadmins themselves - if they were to run their own instance on the Fediverse.Reddit may find enough scabs to keep the lights on, but if this was really a cost-free solution to Reddit’s problem they would have done it ages ago.
They can throw money at it until it works out. Mods do good things, but the bulk of the work is relatively mindless, and easy to outsource.
Yeah, but it will cost them money that they’re not going to earn back.
It will prevent a catastrophic exodus like Digg experienced. Any amount spent it well worth it.
I think they seriously overestimate how many users are going to really remain. Users go where the content is. Users will use 2 applications if the content is in 2 places. Once you get to that point reddit has nothing to offer. This will end badly for them.
or the Pinkertons back in the late 19th century
The Pinkertons are still around, and still being engaged by companies. Just a few months ago Wizards of the Coast (publishers of Magic the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons) were caught using them to intimidate someone who had accidentally-but-legally received unreleased Magic cards into handing over the property.
It most certainly is working.
Classic strikebusting. “Oh you won’t work for an increasingly bad shake? Guess I’ll put these scabs in place instead.”
What’s stopping the entire mod team from nuking the sub? They can remove all formatting, ban the entire userbase and remove all mod bots.
Rollback on to a backup probably
And then Reddit restores from backup.
and opens themselves to brigading.
At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if Reddit has put rate-limiting in place to prevent mass actions like that.
Normally I wouldn’t give their engineers enough credit to figure something like that out, but in this case rate-limiting already exists for posts, comments, chat, etc.
freenode, twitter, reddit shit like this is always a sign of the end
You mean a heavy handed approach and forcing your will on voluntary participants of your social media platform is bad for business?!?!
Couldn’t agree more with you OP. As someone who often got discouraged from posting on Reddit, I’ve been making an effort to post more here and all the responses have been great. I think it helps that we’re all new here and all on this weird journey together. That being said, I’m so happy to be here with all of you!
It’s nice when it doesn’t feel like shoring into a void, right?
They’re digging their own graves.
Digg, get it?
Diggit
If you strike us down we will become more powerful than you can imagine…
Didn’t they already put a scab in r/adviceanimals?
No. The short story there was an inactive mod was top mod and came back just to make the whole sub private and got backlash from the most active mod about it. Admins ended up removing the inactive mod. There is additional back and forth between the two that got posted but it basically ends as the one actually doing the work gained full control.
Yea but cedarwolf is online 24/7. Fucking scary powermod
Yes, they installed a new head mod and the new head mod bans anyone who brings it up. The new mod is a moderator of 106 different subreddits.
The funny thing is that many people remaining on reddit have been praising the admins for threatening to remove mods, because they hate the power mods who control all the subs and want to see them removed, but that’s exactly who reddit is using to replace the mods they dislike.
Mods don’t have a duty to do shit, Reddit doesn’t pay them anything, doesn’t even offer premium at a discount or anything.
Maybe if Reddit was more concerned with not creating a toxic hellspace, they wouldn’t need to rely on volunteers to keep their billion dollar corporation running smoothly. Everything about this pisses me off so fucking bad.
Where do they get off saying mods have a DUTY to them, when they LITERALLY are volunteers and reddit gives them nothing.
And maybe if Reddit wasn’t killing third party mod tools…like the moderation still isn’t gonna be the same no matter how many people you appoint bc you killed the tools that made it possible.
Reddit doesn’t pay them anything, doesn’t even offer premium at a discount or anything.
But it offers them a tiny bit of power, via being a internet janitor. I’m certain that there’s a decent amount of people who will jump at the opportunity to become a moderator of a large subreddit. They are obviously the worst people to wield such power - just like anyone in the real world who seeks power is least likely to use it for good.
Moderation will be low quality, but it will remove spam. As long as the content mill keeps running all is fine. Users of the tiktokified official Reddit app won’t even notice a thing.
If your looking to become a mod for power, sorry the position is not for you
At least it’ll fall apart entirely once they appoint kids who desperately want to be Reddit mods after no one else will do it. If they want to run every subreddit themselves, they can, but it will only hurt them immensely.
They have two options: either hire someone and pay them to mod subreddits or open positions to (even more then currently) unreliable powertripping users who will destroy the platform.
I’m fine with both options. I’m not going back, btw.surprising absolutely nobody…
All of Reddit’s benefits are going to be slowly stripped away. They are under the belief that market saturation is all they need to keep Reddit relevant, but that’s not the case.
reddit has a duty to keep subreddits open if they dont want their IPO to die in a fire.
reddit does not give a flying fuck about their users - it hasnt for quite some time.
stay private/blacked out for eternity, let that platform collapse.
Flash forward 8-10 months and the news post reads: “After catastrophic exodus Reddit asks to join the #fediverse to add content to platform in hopes of salvaging doomed IPO”
They don’t need to ask to join.
This actually will probably happen down the line. And reddit will only keep its user base if they provide a better ui.
Lmao there’s no way reddit figures out how to make a ui. They’re doomed if the fediverse keeps growing
Honestly, Reddit is likely to keep on trucking with a decent sized user base no matter what. A massive number of people aren’t gonna leave, if for nothing but simply not wanting to have to change. I think the most likely thing that happens is that Reddit loses a small chunk of people, their growth heavily slows due to competition and a slow trickle of people leaving (but likely offset by the network effect still favouring them for new people), and they take a revenue ding because advertisers aren’t gonna like all this drama.
The Fediverse will probably have a bit more rapid growth as the blackouts still continue in some subs and more people become aware of alternatives to Reddit, but then just grows slowly, with usability being the big barrier to massive adoption.
Reddit spent years coming up with the shitty new.reddit UI. By the time they improve it again, humans would have landed on Mars
But the instances need to allow their participation and many will not without a hat in hand.
And within hours, most instances will have preemptively defederated from it.
Puts for days on Reddit.
Reddit will do whatever it takes for them. It is unfortunate but not a giant shock.
Remember guys, best thing you can do to get people to move off of reddit is to post more on Lemmy and Kbin
For communities you want but don’t exist on either of them yet, make it! And crosspost to other comms so people know it exists!
