99% of reddit users are aware that moderators do some nice volunteer work but wouldn't cross the street to save them
its only Extremely Online people who care about this Insider Baseball stuff
Reddit's triumph from the user perspective is that all of the content is driven by users, and those users are primarily made up of a small and passionate minority. The downfall of this fact from the business side is that Reddit as a company needs to appease those people because without their contributions, nobody would want to use the site.
How many of those users would notice if Reddit swapped in paid moderators for the largest subs?
Better now than during a roadshow.
I believe moderators on Reddit like to think that they're that important and integral to the site functioning smoothly, but I think the reality is upvoting/downvoting/reporting works perfectly fine in nearly every subreddit.
The only time it doesn't work is in places like r/AskHistorians or r/science which require high quality comments much like this place. You might argue with no moderation the subreddit would turn into a cesspool of reposts and memes - but who really cares? If that's what people want and that's what people are upvoting then let it be. There's no reason to have editorial control over subreddits when the entire point of the subreddit is to have stupid conversations, memes, and jokes. If people keep upvoting and enjoying the same stupid memes and jokes why do moderators feel like they need to step in and disrupt what the people find enjoyable?
This seems very naive, since afaik the mods also deal (thru 3rd party apps) with the large amount of spam that reddit gets. And, of course, who is going to deal with those reports?
I mean, sure, Reddit could just turn into the top 20 or 30 most popular subreddits, hire some offshored mods, and start the content moderation speedrun[1] anew. But, why? And how bad will it get before the IPO? Reddit has spent the past two decades washing their hands of any moderation tasks, as their first party mod tools show. Starting now, with a pissed off power user base, seems suicidal.
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[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...
Wasn't reporting handled by the mods?
> You might argue with no moderation the subreddit would turn into a cesspool of reposts and memes - but who really cares?
Presumably the people who used the subreddit would care. It seems like you think Reddit was only for shitposting, that wasn't my experience. It was a collection of forums, each with their own norms.
Right, I mentioned that for r/AskHistorians and r/science. What about regional subreddits? Why in the world does a subreddit for Toronto need rules like no CN tower pictures, no questions, or no posts about crime? Why can't the only rule be the post has to do with the city?
Why do moderators want to go beyond moderating spam and insist on presenting us with a curated feed of what they feel like I should be consuming? Why can't they let upvotes, downvotes, and reports speak for themselves and use that information to make removal decisions?
Why are so many moderators of subreddits against public moderation logs?
The engaged users care about the topic of the sub and tend to interact with it directly, while the larger audience is subscribed but mostly upvotes things from their main feed without caring which sub it is from, or visiting the sub itself to see what all has been posted there.
I have seen many cases where the “just let the votes sort it out” method leads to things being upvoted, presumably by those users scrolling their main feed who don’t even notice what subreddit it is from, and then comment sections full of “who is upvoting this junk” “this is the third time this has been posted this week” and “mods can we please do something about all of the X posts?”
So mods tend to be pulled in two directions by those two groups, and one is louder than the other so they tend to get their way.
Oh come on, you can't be serious. These are different groups of people. The same users who upvote things are not also complaining about what is being upvoted. You're not going to upvote things and then comment on the post to complain about how it's being upvoted.
It's the "engaged users" who create comment sections full of "who is upvoting this junk" because they don't understand the little circle of of people who make multiple "high quality" posts every day are the minority and the unwashed masses the moderators hate so much actually _DO_ want to see the reposts, memes, sunset pictures, and questions about the best place to find a burger because it's the one neutral topic people don't get into petty political fights over and comb through your comment history in an effort to dunk on you and defeat your point with an ad hominem.
Yes, that was the entire point of my comment.
Also known as the "all unmoderated subreddits eventually become /r/pics" problem. It's why a lot of major subs opted-out of being default when that was still a thing.
I've heard a lot of argumentation along those lines from users that seem to really not care what really made Reddit a special place on the Internet. To them, Reddit is another Instagram/TikTok/Facebook clone, and it seems that's a viewpoint the company is trying to support. It seems completely brain-dead in terms of understanding why the website got popular in the first place, but it seems there's a good number of "satisfied" users that want it that way.
I'd strongly disagree with that. Mods do an immense amount of work on Reddit just to keep their subreddits remotely on topic and not filled with constant reposts and spam. Also, they're the ones who actually deal with most of those reports - they don't get handled by magic or admins in most cases.
Unmoderated/absentee mod subreddits are frequently overrun by spam nonsense or taken completely off topic.
> If people keep upvoting and enjoying the same stupid memes and jokes why do moderators feel like they need to step in and disrupt what the people find enjoyable?
Because then every subreddit becomes basically the same thing and you might as well just have a giant impossible to navigate pile of content that's at best vaguely related to what the place it was posted is supposed to be for.
A lot of users spend part of their time just scrolling their home page feed and part of their time looking at specific subreddits. When doing the former, they're (IMO) less inclined to vote on if it fits in the place it was posted or not, just on if they like it - they may not even notice what sub it was actually posted in.
But that can ruin the subreddit as a place for a specific type of content, which is the typically the reason they joined/followed that subreddit in the first place.
That's what I don't understand. The mods in my city subreddit love to claim they get a ton of alt-right posts and are constantly fighting spam but I've browsed new for years on it and it's _extremely_ rare I see content like that and I highly doubt the mods are acting so fast that they're seeing things I before I do with how often I sat on new auto-refreshing the page.
Just because you don’t see it in new doesn’t mean it wasn’t posted.
Even if it magically could, someone needs to maintain the regex.
They invented work for themselves that doesn't even need to exist and can be solved with the voting system. Every rule change they've made seems to be in an effort to make themselves relevant and take on unnecessary work. This seems like a common theme with Reddit moderators - they give themselves more work to do that nobody is asking them to do in order to justify their existence.
"I'm coming to visit as a tourist/think of moving here - tell me everything interesting to do in the city, where to eat, and where to stay/live"
These tend to be better answered by a wiki section, or a once a month/year thread that all those are referred to - because 95% of them are pretty much all the same for the answers.
That can basically overwhelm all actual news/discussion about the city and most of the larger city subreddits ban/restrict those for a reason.
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There's certainly places with mods run amok harming the ability to have constructive discussions/discuss certain topics most would find worthwhile, but a problem with one city's subreddit isn't every city's subreddit.
A glance at Toronto (I don't normally follow it) suggests they don't allow questions because they have set up a separate subreddit specifically for questions - /r/askTO. (NYC also does this with /r/asknyc). Aside from the past two days, it seems like decent questions over there get a decent response rate, and there's ~180k members, so it's not as though they're being kicked off to oblivion.
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> I've browsed new for years on it and it's _extremely_ rare I see content like that and I highly doubt the mods are acting so fast that they're seeing things I before I do with how often I sat on new auto-refreshing the page.
I will note that it's likely that a lot of the crap is being caught by how they've set up automod (and so, never makes it even to "new"), but depending on what they're doing, that probably still requires a human to sift through the results for stuff that they actually want to allow/is caught up in the filtering rules by mistake.
Would you be able to provide examples of where you believe this to be the case?
Lots of posts the powerusers over the years have complained about and slowly got rid of are repetitive are things like pictures, questions, and touristy stuff. Those things were extremely popular and got lots of upvotes but a couple powerusers who browse new got tired of them, decided to troll every post they didn't like, and the end result was the mods caving to them and not allowing the posts anymore rather than moderating the bad users and letting the votes sort themselves out.
On top of that, in January they decided to make the rule to ban articles about crimes happening in the city unless it has a significant impact. They were going to run a user survey at the end of January to gauge its popularity. They decided not to and now rule 8 of r/Toronto is no posts about crime. Now r/Toronto is just a sanitized feed of .. pretty much nothing? I don't know what content gets posted anymore that isn't complaining about the Ford government or housing prices. It's pretty sad when we don't even get the news about what's happening in Toronto in r/Toronto anymore unless the mods feel like it's an important enough for the whole city to know about. Why do Reddit mods get to decide what's important to r/Toronto users?
and no, it's not realistic to spin off your own subreddit and create a new one. It works with bigger places like Canada or Ontario, but Toronto is too small to support multiple city subreddits and you'll never be more popular than r/Toronto because that's naturally the place everyone is going to go to first.
The same question could be asked of Hacker News, which is run very much like a topically focused subreddit with rules, moderation, merging of duplicate topics, etc.
Well then it’s clear you understand the value of good moderation, even in a place like Hacker News which is not nearly as strict IMO as the subs you mentioned.
I get your examples of over moderation and of course there are plenty of examples of this. I just think you may be in danger of conflating good moderation, which is often invisible and doesn’t involve a lot of moderator posting and onerous rules, with the lack of need for moderation at all.
And, as a nice side benefit, maybe we'll finally get to prune the cabal of super-moderators that have been abusing their influence for over a decade now.
These aren't just cheeto junkie computer nerds, these people are invested. So this is a little like saying "just leave your girlfriend of 5 years" like a lot of emotion is involved. You want it to work. You want to be in the ideal state. You don't want to quit. You want them to change.
That doesn’t even count all the people that are visiting their favorite subreddits only to see them closed with a message detailing what’s happened.
Reddit moderators are uniquely privileged when it comes to making their opinions heard on reddit. The shuttering of subreddits is sensational and splashy enough to get media attention, but in itself says little about how most reddit users feel. A moderator revolt is like a strike of middle managers, revolting against upper management. They can lock the doors and keep all the common workers out, but that isn't evidence that the common workers have much investment in the strike. I think this whole thing probably follows the 90-9-1 rule; the 9 are mods and powerusers flipping out against the 1, while the 90 are probably oblivious or simply indifferent.
These polls have an insane selection bias though. The ones who feel strongly for the issue will be the ones commenting and voting.
It's why stickies/sidebars/etc. rarely work because most of the users simply don't care enough to view them.
Sure, but isn't it in the other direction? The users are most affected by the change are those using third-party apps, but you can't vote in polls in third-party apps.
I was also surprised to see yesterday that this same large sub I made them in was blacked out. Virtue-signalling? Throwing a bone to volunteer co-mods in the sub? Against the API changes? Who knows. Big mess now. Tech people don't like change, but when they get mad, wheels start turning.
Like any activism that actually accomplishes anything, it must be sustained and involve real sacrifice to work. This is just "raising awareness," which I guess it has done, but it's easy enough for Reddit to just batten down the hatches and wait for it to blow over, which it will.
It's no different than when you hear about A march planned for this or that cause.
The vocal dissenters certainly seem to be in the minority.
On the one hand, the admins are being absolute children to the mods. But that said: most (all?) if the Reddit mods I have interacted with are also overgrown children.
The “mods vs admins” thing seems like two toddlers screaming at each other. It’s at a point where I kind of want both sides to lose.
Something in the culture changed 4-5 years ago where being a mod went from a job where you remove spam posts, to a role where you decide what is allowed for discussion.
On my city subreddit, for instance, they’ve gotten it to the point where practically anything which isn’t a photo of a sunset is seen as off topic and removed.
And then there’s stuff like: mods will decide to “lock” threads they don’t like. There was a discussion on /r/Catholicism talking about an anti-Catholic group being invited, then uninvited, then reinvited to perform at a baseball game. After a few hours of discussion the mods “locked” this, meaning you couldn’t participate in it anymore.
It’s extremely annoying.
> On my city subreddit, for instance, they’ve gotten it to the point where practically anything which isn’t a photo of a sunset is seen as off topic and removed.
Yep, this is what needs fixing. My local city subreddit decided there was too much news in the city about crime and banned posting stories about crime in January. It's now June and still a rule. You can only post a story about someone committing a crime or getting arrested if their crime had a city-wide impact.
There was a story about teenagers shooting fireworks off on a public bus around Victoria day this year and that post was allowed. People shat on the teenagers and said whatever they wanted about them. It got as nasty as you'd expect. The post announcing their arrest though? It turned out to be a group of POC and so the mods locked the comments within minutes because they anticipated "bad" comments and it was going to be too difficult to moderate.
The other annoying thing before that was a small group of powerusers getting annoyed with people asking too many easy-to-Google questions. So a few choice posters would always come in and make the same "I recommend House of Lancaster" (a strip club with a reputation) for every question that got asked. It didn't matter what the question was, there was at least 1 house of Lancaster suggestion. It turned into a meme, the moderators noticed people were hostile to newcomers, and rather than outlawing being hostile to people they banned questions!
It’s _extremely_ annoying.
My actual hope is that what comes out of this protest is that the majority of moderation is simply removed.
Forgive me for not shedding any tears because mods wont be able to stalk users using push shift anymore. The horror.
hah, I tried making this argument for months, no years, after the decision was made - that they were banning the wrong thing. It's trivial (and a built in Reddit feature) to automatically hide posts after you vote them (up or down - you have full control) and there's even the hide button to hide posts you don't want to vote on. It would have been so easy (and made nearly everyone happy) to have the rule to be against bad faith answering questions. To encourage people to downvote and ignore questions you they want to answer. If nobody is answering or voting for the questions then people will stop asking them.
Well powerusers didn't want questions period (and I think some friends of the mods already had control of the question subreddit) so they punted questions off to a different subreddit.
The mods definitely get some enjoyment through trolling people and making the experience on the city subreddit miserable - most of them are extremely active in a shitposting subreddit that was specifically made for making fun of users in the city subreddit. The powerusers that were involved in the bad behavior own the shitposing subreddit too. It's a small sort of r/drama or r/subredditdrama for a local subreddit. If you make the "right" comments in the city subreddit (i.e. dunk on the "right" people) you get invited to mod the shitposting subreddit.
What's really needed is a public moderator log outlining what gets removed. I wouldn't care about things being removed that much if I had an option to see it. I really hate that they can remove things that _someone_ found interesting about the city and I can't see it at all because of arbitrary rules the moderators made.
Our MPPs and MPs are elected for multi-year terms.
Why not require that mods be elected for a 2 year term and that they have to campaign to be re-elected? If they are a hated mod, they won't get re-elected.
Instead we have dictator-for-life Eric Cartman moderating multiple subs.
If people want to post sunsets and nobody is writing you emails to complain about it, then have at it. It's the voice of the people.
It seems to come down to that people need to debate on the same level. Some drunk bum is not going to walk out of a bar and into a classroom and debate a professor. But that's what happens on social media.
Reddit has tools to hide posts you personally don't want to see without affecting the entire subreddit with silly rules. If you browse new you should be aware of these things.
hah, my reference to the one large sub where the mods are widely hated was about my city's sub which from your description might be the same. Edit: In this case, I have some empathy for the mods though, since that sub faced invasions from people outside the city who hate it.
Most of the subs I'm in, the mods are thought of pretty highly or not at all.
I think this is the case for many things. And I imagine people will/are get wise to it. Elon Musk I think figured this out when he did what he did with Twitter. Some very online people really cared and made a lot of noise and the very online part of the media that cares made a lot of noise. But those people don't really matter and the media side has declining ratings year after year as they become more and more irrelevant.
I think the paper tigers are starting to be exposed and they had a good run for the last 10 years by being very online and making a lot of noise. But ultimately, their voices don't matter.
Having another income source really does not imply he does not care about a company where he is spending most of the time.
Advertising will come back. There’s anti-Twitter pressure campaigns and for economic reasons ad spend slowed. It’s all coming back.
He controls the worlds largest and most important megaphone. That’s priceless.
Yeah, because the bots and spam area largely out of control. There is significantly much more of it them used to be. And no, ads did not went down because of pressure campaigns, but because of serious mismanagement of ad accounts.
If the last US Presidential election was held on Reddit, Bernie Sanders would have won in a landslide. He obviously did not.
When Netflix announced it was cracking down on password sharing, Reddit declared that this would be the final nail in their coffin. Instead, subscriptions skyrocketed.
Reddit power users are angry at spez and claim that this will be the end of the site, but the average Reddit user has maybe heard about all of this, and mostly doesn't care.
That's why people do things like black outs and protests, so people can learn who people are and what is happening.
> probably wouldn't care if they learned about his shenanigans
That's information is associated with protests, so people can decide if they care.
I can actually understand how most wouldn't care about this. This change isn't that important to me except in that's it's another stepping stone on the death of the free and open web. Twitter API, Reddit API, real ID on Facebook, probably countless other things. What we expected to have in the 2010's is going fast.
> Even spez complaining about Christian recording the calls seems hollow when those recordings are what proved that spez was lying to the community
Were the calls ever posted? For the way Reddit has handled this and previous issues I definitely believe Christian over spez, but unless I missed something, right now everyone is just believing what Christian said, right?
The transcript is here: https://gist.github.com/christianselig/fda7e8bc5a25aec9824f9...
The recording itself was posted on Reddit in the apolloapp subreddit.
Yes. On Christians Reddit post about the shutdown. Transcripts and links to specific audio bits. Pretty easy to locate.
https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
http://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-3...
Christian: Oh, just give me $10 million and i'll be quiet.
Reddit: What?!? Did I hear you right?
Christian: Huh, oh I just mean the app is loudly using the api and i'll make that quiet.
Reddit: Oh, sorry, I misunderstood you to be asking us to pay you to go away.
And then Christian would go and spout off how "even reddit agreed that they misunderstood me on the call". It's so incredibly disingenuous of him.
If they still thought it was a shakedown, it would be honest for them to later say to their team that they thought it was a shakedown.
I don't know how much to trust Reddit, and the 30-days notice to showstopper API fees looks very bad. But I see a lot of people just repeating Tweet-sized soundbites, which leads to a dysfunctional and more easily manipulated society.
Christian's post: https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
Audio clip: https://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-...
Devil's advocate still: the perception of a shakedown isn't necessarily dependent on mishearing something literally as "go quietly". What reason does Reddit have to pay $10M, rather than pay $0? Reddit leadership might even feel like it's a shakedown from their perspective, whether or not that's the intention or perception from some app developers.
Personally, were I involved, I would indeed be mentally tracking everyone's perspectives and honesty, since that matters a lot (e.g., a mutually better deal might be reached when you understand each other; or you might get a contract, but they might not honor it in good faith, or will screw you at renewal time).
But I think Internet pitchforks would do well to keep memetic talking points to the unambiguous (e.g., the proposed API licensing fees, the short time horizon, a party's claims of how that will affect them), and avoid paths that seem more like (ahem) "We did it, Reddit!" loose cannon character assassination.
1) Shut Apollo down: increase ad revenues, decrease server costs (if the claim that Apollo is inefficient is true)
2) Apollo pays $20M: increase api revenues
3) Pay Apollo $10M: decreased revenue, maintain high server costs.
I don't even understand how this kind of deal would make any sense to propose.
Christian is clearly thinking on his feet, so obviously he doesn't have a value proposition for reddit. All he is really doing is letting reddit know he might be open to it, the details could be negotiated later.
Reddit clearly has all the power here (Apollo is fully dependant on reddit), so they would have been able to negotiate it down. Maybe all the way to $1 million?
Anyway, reddit clearly weren't open to it, so it fell flat on it's face.
That means, if you pay 1 million now, it would be less than the cost to upkeep for 30 days and it would we a win win
2) Yes, this is better for reddit but untenable for Apollo.
3) If you buy the app that makes your site SING, that everyone loves, then you keep all those users, and make money from them instead of losing them.
Also, don't forget that everything before an IPO is magnified. This has cost reddit perhaps hundreds of millions now in bad press and lowered valuation.
It's all horse shit and they know it. I don't claim to know the reason, I can only speculate. But, what I do know after reading Christian's posts and listening to the phone call is that reddit, and Spez specifically, are being super shitty.
Reddit: You will now pay us $20 million per year or we’re shutting you down. You have 30 days notice. Apollo: If Apollo is really costing you $20 million per year, you could pay us $10 million to stop, and you’d come out way ahead! I’m half joking.
Reddit: Are you threatening us?!
Apollo: No, I was just jokingly making a point.
Reddit: “Oh, I misunderstood. I immediately apologize.”
Reddit (to mods publicly): This guy is threatening us!
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Wait, what?
Who’s threatening who????
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit (see controversies section)
It's like when a person complains that her husband looked at her phone, when by doing so he discovered she was cheating on him.* Where's the trust?
* Genders included for sentence readability, not to imply anything about women or men
They aren't mutually exclusive situations.
Even spez complaining about Christian recording the calls seems hollow when those recordings are what proved that spez was lying to the community. Frankly, anyone who does business with any of these execs should see now that they can and will happily lie and mislead. I don't know how you come back from that.