It's certainly a pattern.
Reddit has announced they're providing carveouts for apps that provide critical moderation tools, that justification is already gone.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/148ks6u/indefinit...
Edit: Not only that, shifting mod tools to the free tier doesn't magically solve the fiscal issue third-party apps have and will still result in them shutting down. A huge part of the reason mods use those third-party apps is because Reddit's own app doesn't provide the tools they want/need. To the point of the other person who responded to you, Reddit has absolutely dangled a carrot that does nothing in an effort to seem like they're being helpful.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blacko...
“And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”
What does that make spez relative to the constituents in his community?
The process for selecting moderators is way less meritocratic or democratic than this. They merely got there first, finders keepers. The analogy for landed gentry is accurate.
Is that an actual accurate count? If so, Im impressed. I dont think I could compile a list of 100,000 people that are alive by name.
edit: And if I even came close, most of them probably wouldnt be qualified to run reddit -- so doubly impressed.
The analogy for landed gentry is accurate.
If subreddit mods are landed gentry, then so are open source maintainers.
Of course you can make an infinite amount of subs, but with 0 users they would be pointless.
Which is the same spez bets on in the API / 3rd party app situation, which is kind of funny :)
(Although, again, this is how open source works as well. You can't just fork Debian or ffmpeg or Rails and expect a community on Day 1...)
If you're talking about the "long tail" of smaller subs, those get forked/replaced all of the time if there are mod issues or if somebody just has an idea to cover a specific topic from a different angle.
For an example, a lot of people didn't like the moderation tactics of r/audiophile, nor their refusal to look at affordable gear, so some of us made r/budgetaudiophile. We serve different parts of the audience and we cooperate with eachother. And both of us refer headphone-related questions to r/headphones. That is an example of things actually working Extremely Well.
Reddit is in an interesting position. I think its only real value is that long tail. That is where the actual valuable content+community is. The ginormous generalist subs get huge traffic but are utterly disposable - there's no real reason to get your memes or whatever from Reddit vs ICanHazCheezeburger vs random meme-based Facebook group etc etc etc etc etc.
Probably not reddit folk will be turned off by the name, and not get the joke. And I bet a lot of members of that sub only subscribed because they are inveterate redditors and not because they're interested in the subject.
Even if you think the shit coming out of his mouth to be the right attitude, you have to ask why he’s saying it out loud, abrasively, in public, where it’s only going to make the product less attractive.
The Board is not your savior here.
But it may the intent to have him make all the unpopular changes, have him resign with a big payout, and blame him for everything without reversing anything like they did with Ellen Pao.
Though usually that's a hired gun (e.g., Pao, Wong) rather than a somewhat-harder-to-replace returned founder.
In retrospect, I think Pao earned a bad and bum rap.
you're imagining that the board just sees this disruption and wants it over as quickly as possible, but why do you think they would take that view and not want to solve the disruptions in the long-term by removing specific agitators and generally adding additional checks and oversight to the tools they used for their disruption so that it doesn't happen again in the future?
no business is going to let the union sit on the factory floor and disrupt operations - you can strike at the gate all you want, but private property is private property. And when mods end up talking about permanent ongoing intermittent disruption of operations ("touch grass tuesdays") there's not a single board member who is even going to negotiate with that as a potential possibility hanging over their heads. No, you're gone, this is their site and you're being a nuisance.
And this is the point where people start babbling about how mods are irreplaceable and they'd all walk away and leave reddit in the lurch, but it turns out a lot of mods actually just want to get back to it and are being overruled. Let alone if the mod clique was opened up for new membership within their communities - there is inevitably a flood of new applications whenever it's opened. People love being able to push buttons at people, it's a tiny bit of power and that's all it takes.
https://old.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/149z2nd/requ...
Without the blackouts, reddit will be back to normal in 6 months. And that's what terrifies a large portion of the blackout userbase - they know they don't actually have broad enough public support to make it work without forcing other people into it.
It's not the first or the last time a public forum has had a large group of users upset enough to step into disruptive behavior to try and get their way. We could easily see people start launching DDOS attacks or similar as well, it's happened before. Redditors think they're special but from a high-level perspective you're no different from some jilted wikipedian deleting articles or a 4chan user flooding a thread with gore, or DDOS'ing a forum. You're a nuisance, not a freedom fighter, and you're on private property.
The real fun one is going to be if some users escalate things enough that CFAA gets involved. Disruption of service, enjoy your lawsuit/jail time. And causing all requests to go 500 or not return the proper data is still disruption even if the service is still notionally up and responding to pings. Remember, this is a law that makes it illegal to log into a service if the operator wouldn't have wanted you there - using mod tools to disrupt service is still disrupting service!
the mods and community have power and control over operations
Or
Mods get PAID
Really.... Volunteers have a reasonable expectation of influence on how their work is used.
He's there because rich folks, e.g. actual landed gentry decided he should be, not because the users chose him to lead.
This is democratic in the same way the prince electors system of the HRE was, ie not at all.
> The community is reddit users, which didn't get to democratically pick him at all.
You were expecting democracy? From an analogy about feudalism?
This cuts both ways though, mods are not the reddit users either, and users do not get to democratically pick mods either. The guy who squatted the domain name in 2005 is the permanent authority for that keyword, unless there is a specific ToS violation to unseat them.
If you don't want to post, or you don't want to mod, that's fine, log off. There are procedures for abandoned communities/moderation that will be followed and everyone moves on. But you can't shut everything down for everyone else either, and you certainly shouldn't be surprised when the board operator then removes your mod privileges and bans you for disruption of service.
There is no "the community voted to ignore the ToS and allow disruption of service". That's not a thing. Yes, the service is still disrupted even if the server is returning 500, or an empty page, or your protest page. Just like when Greenpeace hacks someone's site, that's still disruptive and illegal.
Be happy you're not being prosecuted under CFAA for denial of service. If logging into the system when the operator wouldn't want you there is so clearly illegal that it regularly results in jailtime for bona-fide security researchers, what do you think CFAA would say about knowingly utilizing mod tools to cause disruption of service and then continuing after being told to knock it off?
And yes, computer crimes are prosecuted quite globally.
But in both cases I don't think that democracy is what you want. In the case of subreddits, it doesn't matter because you can always create your own subreddit. And in the case of Reddit as a whole, if people stick with the site after this, then they'll deserve the corporatist crap they'll get served.
Oligarchy != rich people existing and doing stuff
This is all, of course, a distraction to divide and conquer.
Many mods polled their communities before going dark and there was a lot of support in general.
Hell, very often when mods are too much against the communities interests they migrate to another sub or sabotage it and then mods cave in.
Pretending that "mods are the evil guys that don't speak for the little guy" has to be the stupidest narrative so far and spez shows his extreme dishonesty there.
I thought he would beat the outage by "soldiering on"and letting things play out naturally, since there's no clear and friendly reddit alternative, but he's definitely coming out very aggressively in a manner that could actuslly hurt reddit and him further in the medium and long term.
Yup. See /r/marijuana and /r/trees or /r/worldpolitics and /r/anime_titties for examples.
That hasn't really been the case for a while. Especially for the larger subs like r/videos. R/news for example was created 15 years ago and it's oldest mod was modded two years ago. Also the admins come in and remove top mods of problematic subs (generally alt right/brigading subs) all the time.
That is some hefty fucking projection from him.
Lol like he cares about democracy.
It makes him just like many authoritarian dictators in history. Taking something of value away from the people who actually built it, and claiming it's for the people while it's really all about giving him power.
Completely unsurprising in this case though. These people built their communities on someone else's platform, and now they want to be paid. This is bound to happen.
(You choose which one!)
Or the people who made moderator tooling to hack around his lack of moderator tooling.
Or those who wrote entire third party apps to get around his lack of viable third party apps.
Or those people who had to implement accessibility for the blind or otherwise disabled to get around his lack of tooling for the blind or otherwise disabled.
But besides all those people, yeah he pays the bills.
Well okay he doesn't actually pay anything, it's the investors and advertisers that pay the actual bills.
But other than all that spez contributes by.... Uhh ..... Lowering server costs by causing a mass exodus?
Get people to run and supply it for free
Sell the supplies and profit
Recruit free labor
Replace them when they stop working
________________________________
Notes:
1. Actual landed gentry labeling volunteer labour they'd cultivated and created as "landed gentry" has to go down as one of the most audacious rhetorical distractions of all time. Or at least the past week.
The oldest moderator on r/news has only been in their position for slightly more than 3 years: https://www.reddit.com/r/news/about/moderators
Whose fault is that?
Seems like Reddit administrators exact design.
I moderate a small subreddit and don't even know what tools they are talking about. I don't want to say goodbye to RedReader.
I can kinda see arguments for both directions, but I can think of more that would cause me to have less confidence.
The biggest IMO is that what's happening here is a gamble by leadership that people are so drawn to Reddit that they'll give up their far superior mobile apps or desktop experiences for it.
The second biggest is the speed with which they pushed this decision. By forcing it to happen so quickly and not offering an actually sufficient grace period, it's pretty clear this is just about trying to fatten up for the IPO and doesn't represent solid medium to long-term thinking and direction.
Maybe investors won't care. Maybe users are truly too hooked to Reddit specifically to leave, as we've seen mostly play out with Twitter.
As an investor, what is the value here? They’re trying to play in a space occupied by giants like TikTok and Facebook and failing. It’s just hard to imagine investing in such a company.
It's seemed like that for years. They've had strong reasons to develop the site for years. The two main things they've done are build an app for phones and spend a relatively long time creating a "new" UI that changes the look of the site and provides more advertising space but has no major changes to the way the site works.
It's like they don't have any idea how to actually develop the site, and they're limited to doing window dressing.
A more 'friendly' UI attracts people who don't have much of note to say, will consume what they're given, and respond to ads more.
That's a weird sort of elitism. Friendly UIs attract everyone, isn't that what a friendly UI means?
One of the issues with reddit's redesign is that they made it more 'friendly' by introducing more media inline. If you have a site that allows for discussion of any topic like reddit, but optimizes for gigantic pictures and animations and by default your feed is filled with content that is more suited for that (eg, things like cat pictures), then you're absolutely going to attract a different audience than a utilitarian pure text site. People who just want to scroll through a feed of cat pictures are going to spend their time on a site optimized for it.
Of course, there is overlap in interests and you'll find a lot of people who'd prefer a utilitarian site to also occasionally like scrolling through cat pictures, but it seems clear to me that the shape of the ui will cause a divergence and overall different culture on a given site. A better example for this than reddit is probably imgur -- you're almost certainly not going there for intellectual discussion, right?
I think the contention here is the word friendly being a proxy for less information density and for a larger number of images / video.
Some people would rather eat at an expensive restaurant where the host with a fake french accent turns away underdressed plebs.
I'd characterize it as "text-dense" vs "spacy and image/video oriented".
The second is more immediate, it takes less concentration, so it attracts more people and more information that's not very meaningful.
By keeping things text-only, you keep the information more meaningful.
They bought AlienBlue - a 3rd party app, that they now claim shouldn't now exist, and should never have existed.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...
As the only surviving Reddit co-founder who failed to capitalize on the spectacular luck of launching Reddit and had to crawl back, only spez wants to claim the Jed Clampett title. Only now, in this gritty sequel, given the opportunity to coast in constant wealth and comfort for the rest of his days skimming the labors of the people actually successfully mining the lucky strike he himself failed to realize, he seems resentful, somehow. Regretful. Wants a do-over of the founding of Reddit. Reddit was a springboard to greater success for other founders (well, except that other one), why not him. What else can a discontented hillbilly founder do, but drive off the established, successful industry happily pumping money into his pockets, how else to get a do-over of the founding of Reddit. Maybe he can get it right this time.
The result is they were 1) unprepared for the negative reaction by moderators and 2) woefully blindsided by moderator influence on users and their influence on site control.
Also explains why they have never put any time into developing moderator tooling.
Its this. It starts at the top:
> Huffman, also a Reddit co-founder, said he plans to pursue changes to Reddit’s moderator removal policy to allow ordinary users to vote moderators out more easily if their decisions aren’t popular. He said the new system would be more democratic and allow a wider set of people to hold moderators accountable. [1]
If he had modded a big sub, like a city sub for example, he'd know that you can't actually moderate toward popular opinion.
Not only because what is popular is not always sustainable. Leadership is doing the right thing even if it is not popular. But on a less obvious level, this wouldn't work because the site doesn't handle the influence of astroturfing and brigading.
To even provide for fair votes would require user abuse administration tools the site clearly does not have.
What a bummer. I've invested a fair amount of time into reddit. It has a lot of useful information. It is a shame it is led by this guy. This whole thing did not need to happen. It seems so common to be let down by leaders of social media companies.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14aeq5j/new_admin...
Yes well choosing what is right is up to the majority, or you describe totalitarianism or maybe communism depending on what way you'd take it.
I still agree Reddit is making a deck move by doing this. I’m still using Alien Blue and even though there’s been no updates it still works, and will probably break when the new API structure lands, of which I’m really sad. I will probably not be using Reddit at all anymore as this is the only entry I’ve had for the past decade.
The fact that Reddit chose to take this course of action tells me that they don’t actually know that much about their own website. That might also explain why they never built out the tooling to begin with.