> There are Reddit users waiting in the wings, wringing their hands ready to jump at the 'oppurtunity' to moderate established subreddits and will happily devote their time to custodial duties. (...) There are people who thrive on having power over others even though in this case, subreddit moderation, it is perceived power.

Yes. Those are the very people who should be never ever allowed to become mods, or to be anywhere near any position of power. This is how people seeking status and power self-identify, and if they're given mod power, you can count on their subreddits going to shit rather quickly, and/or them eventually getting bored and quitting, once they realize that being a mod is a hard and thankless job, with people who need you the most hating you the most.

Now sure, the current set of moderators isn't made of saints and purely selfless people either. But it's stable. The worst moderators long ago dropped out, or rode their subreddits down to ground. Reddit ecosystem reached an equilibrium. Now the corporate is shaking everything up, and the platform will have to re-equilibrize again. I expect to watch good subreddits go to shit, some getting forked off, and maybe those forks thriving if there's still enough selfless enough volunteers left after this debacle.

> Those are the very people who should be never ever allowed to become mods, or to be anywhere near any position of power

Okay. How about AI as the new mod then?

Bots creating content. Bots moderating content to fit corporate agenda. Clueless users consuming streamlined content. That would be a perfect circle.

Just cut out the literal middle “man”, and have the bots click on the ads too.

Sure, if you also let the bots buy things and sell things, then it'll be perfectly reasonable for them to also click on ads.

At that point, however, we may find out that the global economy turned into a fully automated, circular optimization process, and took off, leaving humans behind to starve and die.

The paper clip maximizer in reality.

Funny that this is the only part companies don't want.

An ouro-bot-os

> Okay. How about AI as the new mod then?

Sure, when we solve AI alignment (and I mean x-risk / Eliezer-style AI alignment, not the outrage-minimizing political correctness that's being called "alignment" by OpenAI and the others).

And how will this AI (that doesn't exist but sure) interact with reddit?

> Yes. Those are the very people who should be never ever allowed to become mods, or to be anywhere near any position of power.

Who do you think the existing mods are?

> Who do you think the existing mods are?

The people invested in the community (or their vision of the community) enough to do that job for free, and do it well enough the community accepts it. I.e. people either not from the group I mentioned, or the least bad cases from it.

Right now (or at least before the blackout), you were looking at subreddits in a steady state. Some had excellent moderation, others less so. Users moved around according to their tastes, and as things settled, every subreddit ended having its own kind of flavor and quality level.

With the existing moderators leaving in protest and with Reddit shaking things up, everything is in flux again. It will take time for the worst, power/status-seeking mods to eventually get bored and drop out (thankfully Reddit isn't actually paying the mods, thus giving the bad ones little reason to stay), possibly destroying whatever subreddits they took over in the process.

> Who do you think the existing mods are?

I am. I moderate my local city subreddit. All I do is remove surveys and point people seeking housing to the megathread.

(We're a university town, so lots of students seek people willing to fill in badly designed questionaires.)

Yes, the biggest subreddits will always have a number of power tripping mods. But the vast majority of subreddits have a stable mod team putting in a little daily effort to keep their online community organised. These are the people who will walk away if the removal of their preferred tools makes moderating harder. At least I know I will.

I keep seeing this ubercynical take that "mods are all on a power trip" from people who are clearly planning to invest in the IPO. Normally this forum has a lot of nuanced thought but on this one I'm seeing a lot of VC groupthink happening.

No matter how you try to fashion your logic, Reddit was a community effort, done in good faith by many volunteers, and it really was the last of the platforms with any sort of legitimacy because of that, and that is now gone for good.

Do people learn the lesson about trusting capital? We'll see.

To be entirely fair, it was already common on reddit to accuse mods of being on power trips. /U/awkwardtheturtle and other powermods have been a known issue for a while (see also: the /r/GME moderator kerfuffle). I agree that most moderator work was airline quality (few incidents but "televized" heavily for its failures), but most incidents get you going "well why was anyone allowed this kind of unchecked power in the first place?".

I think people blaming moderators for this don't get that this is people losing what is ultimately their hobby and not some kind of powertrip by 2k+ people all at the same time.

> I keep seeing this ubercynical take that "mods are all on a power trip" from people who are clearly planning to invest in the IPO

I think most of the people who are negative about Reddit mods are not because of any IPO.

My theory is that a significant amount of the people who are very negative of Reddit mods are people who have had negative experiences with mods from Reddit or mods in other communities, and who are generalising their experiences to apply to all mods.

I do agree with you, though if any of them are reading this, I have to also validate their experience, if not their conclusions; I was shadowbanned in r/Winnipeg, my hometown and nearest city, and not because I'm an alt-right troll, I just have a somewhat argumentative tone about things I care deeply about - it came down to my tone.

I know this because the sub is absolutely run, without acknowledgement, as a left-wing, anti-Tory space. As it happens, I am a left-wing, anti-Tory person who despises the people I am currently validating, so my opinions would never have run up against the mods' echo chamber policy. I definitely said and posted a few things which were highly opinionated, though, and which I don't particularly disavow, and which might have been less than constructive in how I said it. I'm pretty sure the post had to do with me talking about flipping the bird at someone who wasn't wearing a mask. It's not an anti-mask space.

In the spirit of disclosure, and because this is starting to feel like a postmortem of the site, and so you have an idea what I was shadowbanned for, here is an example of my worst Reddit behavior (I'm the same on here as I was on there basically): after I rumbled the shadowban and left r/Winnipeg, I briefly went over to r/Manitoba, which promotes itself as the "free speech alternative" to r/Winnipeg, and it does indeed have some more conservative voices in the mix, and that's fine.

That said, our current provincial gov is Tory and hostile to public service, so our roads and everything else have been steadily deteriorating everywhere. This government is highly bolstered by our local Mennonite Bible Belt, which is more or less everything South of Winnipeg. Anyways, there was flooding last spring and the roads were not fixed in a timely fashion. The only paved road to my town washed out last spring, and they JUST got started a couple months ago replacing it.

So anyways, someone posted a newspaper article about the residents of one of these Tory-voting strongholds being out protesting the state of the highways. I was momentarily incensed at the gall of these people who created the situation and were now howling about not being able to drive their F350s to the Tim Horton's for some tasty Private Equity sludge, and so I said something along the lines of "Enjoy the world you voted for, hicks!"

For my use of "hicks" in the "free speech alternative forum" I was not shadowbanned this time, but rather, the mods apparently kicked it up the ladder and I got a three-day ban for "promoting hate". I deleted my account about two minutes after getting the notification, and that was it for me and Reddit, about a year ago.

In the case of the actual three-day ban I can't really argue with it, it's a technicality as far as I'm concerned, and selectively applied, but that's neither here nor there, I said the word, I earned the wrist slap. But that was basically the period on a sentence that I had been writing ever since realizing the shadowban was in place.

If r/Winnipeg had given me a straight three-day ban and warned me about my tone, I would have accepted the rebuke actually. But shadowbans are sneaky and malicious, in my opinion, and there is no scenario where they are not; if you have a problem with someone, you say it to their face. If you kick someone out, you call the bouncer or you do it yourself, you don't send a robot to waste potentially years of their mental energy. That's being a shit human.

I don't sit and stew about the mods who did these things, but I also won't participate in a site that allows it. That's the other reason I'm holding off on joining Lemmy for now, I would like to see if any sites take a stance on having no shadowbans. I can accept a ban quite happily, it just means this is not one of the places for me. I cannot accept misdirection of my energy and time, even once.

Yep, I was also shadow banned from my local city subreddit shortly after being blanked banned from several other subreddits for simply participating in unrelated subreddits. Shadowbans are particularly problematic in city based subreddits where people are more likely to actually try and connect for something in meat space. Missing persons, lost pets, etc. We found a stray pet, but it took my wife creating an account, to finally connect with the owner via reddit despite me having had a 10 plus year old reddit account that was shadowbanned for our city.

> shadowbans are sneaky and malicious, in my opinion, and there is no scenario where they are not; if you have a problem with someone, you say it to their face. If you kick someone out, you call the bouncer or you do it yourself, you don't send a robot to waste potentially years of their mental energy. That's being a shit human.

Yeah, shadowbans suck.

On the other hand, some people will just keep creating new accounts over and over every time they are told that their account has been banned.

It’s a difficult situation.

>Yeah, shadowbans suck. On the other hand, some people will just keep creating new accounts over and over every time they are told that their account has been banned.

Any online forum will just become full of crap without moderation. So moderation is a necessity. And shadowbans are a sometimes-efffective tool of moderation.

How then, to prevent abuse of power? One possibility would be to allow multiple competing groups of moderators on the same forum and everyone allowed to sign up fro whichever moderation group(s) they prefer. Then if the "official" moderators start behaving unreasonably, people will simply vote with their feet and use different ones.

> One possibility would be to allow multiple competing groups of moderators on the same forum and everyone allowed to sign up fro whichever moderation group(s) they prefer. Then if the "official" moderators start behaving unreasonably, people will simply vote with their feet and use different ones.

That’s pretty much what Reddit is like already. If you dislike the mods of one subreddit you can join another competing subreddit, or start your own.

Likewise, with Lemmy if the people on one instance are bad, leave the instance and join another or run an instance of your own.

The people who would troll you like that already know what a shadow ban is and will just create more accounts anyway.

It’s not a difficult situation, you are being willfully ignorant.

I also got into a small argument in another thread about low effort sites.

Another constant criticism of fediverse sites I'm seeing here is equally weird, this idea that responsibility for finding the right instance is given - not forced upon, but gifted to - the user, and that is a problem.

It's a feature, it's the feature that makes the system invulnerable to the sort of enshittification that this forum's parent organization specializes in. therefore, in the minds of quite a lot of people here, it's a bug, and frankly, of course VC heads would think that way; never mind the petty dictatorship of the moderator, if there is no market capturing endgame where you can either cash out or seize a community and abuse it as your personal platform (Hi, Elon), that definitely is a bug, I suppose.

My thinking is that having a slight learning curve barrier to entry, maybe that's a good thing. Maybe having a zero effort onboarding process, maybe THAT is the bug. Because who does an easy onboarding process serve, if not the VChead who wants to capture as many eyeballs as possible and turn them into income? It certainly doesn't seem to help the mods who have to deal with people who can very easily create a new account once banned.

And for the record, there are extremely easy ways for anyone, not just a troll, to tell if they're shadowbanned. Shadowbanning is Security Through Obscurity, like changing the ssh port on your firewall to 54804 and thinking you can then leave password login enabled. It's pretend. Once I noticed three posts with zero engagement all I had to do was log out in order to check. The only thing it offers is conflict avoidance in the moment, and will only make people deeply angry, and in some cases, more determined than ever. Me, once I see I'm not wanted I'm gone on my own steam, generally.

But, I can see why reddit moderators have to resort to it: they do not have the ability to ban IPs, and Reddit is not incentivized to ban IPs or IP blocks, because that runs contrary to their primary purpose, to capture and monetize eyeballs.

Compare to an operator of an individual Instance: of a sub is having issues with a persistent individual troll, they can appeal to the sysop (I just decided I'm calling them sysops and I don't give a shit what anyone else does) and have that individual's IP banned. If other instances allow him to return through them, well, we have defederation for instances that don't keep their houses clean.

Moreover, the sysop has zero motivation to build up as many users as possible, and that is going to do more than anything else to ensure that the only instances which tolerate trolls are going to be the ones setup specifically for that purpose, and that problem is already more or less sorted.

Bottom line, the problem you're describing arises from the attempt to make content moderation compatible with scale, and that's just never gonna work, and without scale, you have no capitalism.

> And for the record, there are extremely easy ways for anyone, not just a troll, to tell if they're shadowbanned. Shadowbanning is Security Through Obscurity, like changing the ssh port on your firewall to 54804 and thinking you can then leave password login enabled. It's pretend. Once I noticed three posts with zero engagement all I had to do was log out in order to check. The only thing it offers is conflict avoidance in the moment, and will only make people deeply angry, and in some cases, more determined than ever. Me, once I see I'm not wanted I'm gone on my own steam, generally.

If the user doesn't post, then shadow banning is much harder to detect. I regularly see comments from users who were shadow-banned by Reddit; it can take months for them to figure it out. We use shadow-banning only on spammers and trolls. Our process requires peer approval and evidence; there's also an audit trail. We used to ban these accounts, but shadow-banning them instead substantially reduced the amount of harassment we receive. Conflict is inevitable when moderating a subreddit, and we'd rather spend our effort on users who participate in good faith.

And that's one reason the platform has no legitimacy. You say YOU only use it on a certain type, but it got used on me. Have a look at my comments here, I'm far from perfect but I'm neither of those things.

I outlined in a different conversation in this thread that I can see why you have to resort to this: Reddit is not incentivized to ban IPs, and I assume you are likewise not empowered to.

Reddit needs as many eyeballs as they can get, and that is why if you simply ban an account they are able to create a new one; the problem for you, the cog, is unfortunate, but from their perspective they get a new user on their balance sheet every time.

Reddit is incentivized to make your task a struggle that never ends. So it's not that I judge you for it, I judge Reddit's conflict of interest and complete unsuitability as a public square.

That said, I still see what you do as fundamentally cowardly.

Edit: It is intended to be a process with no appeal as a feature. Would you sign up to have your relationship with a community forum severed, secretly and capriciously, and with no appeal or review intended to be possible, at the whim of someone you have never met? And even if you had an attack of integrity, it will never not be a Reddit feature for the reasons outlined above, so your only course of action would not be to stop shadowbanning, but rather, to simply leave the forum for a better one. If Reddit survives as a place where Geographical locations keep their community forums, that will be a horrible fate for us.

> shadowbans are sneaky and malicious, in my opinion, and there is no scenario where they are not

I think they can be justified under select circumstances.

For instance, I think a shadowban is justified for accounts that exist merely to post spam or purposely derail every thread, and obviously aren't being used by a reasonable person. If an account represents a long-term existential threat to the quality of the community, then almost any legal means are justified to take action against it. Whether it's a bot or a human who just wants to watch the community burn, let them shout into the ether.

On the other hand, shadowbans against people who accidentally break the rules a couple times, or call someone a doodiehead, or have the wrong politics, or are subscribed to the wrong communities, are largely unethical. It's a form of disembodiment being imposed on an individual who has a reason for wanting to communicate with others, even if their communication is considered disagreeable.

Sadly, the latter is far more common on Reddit.

Even in the case of the incessant troll, the shadowban is just pretend. I identified after three posts with no engagement that something was afoot, and in order to see it, all I had to do was log out. It is incredibly petty, and even more ineffective.

You might be surprised. I've seen users who were shadow-banned by Reddit for months without figuring it out.

Exactly, I don’t think people would remotely feel the same if Wikipedia did something to alienate all the experienced moderators in such a way a mass exodus occurred. Wikipedia would go to shit as inexperienced mods took over

Yes there will be inexperienced people willing to step up as mod in the short term because they probably have zero clue what it entails. It will go poorly and the subreddits will be overrun by shit.

Wikipedia went to shit long time ago. I only trust it with plants and animals.

> Normally this forum has a lot of nuanced thought but on this one I'm seeing a lot of VC groupthink happening.

This usually translates into: "I thought HN was great as long as I agreed with the general sentiment, but now that we disagree the VC groupthink is too much for me".

If you thought HN normally does a lot of nuanced thought then maybe that's still the case today and it's you that lost the nuance.

Maybe you need to read my statement more closely, specifically the words "on this one".

I said in a comment to someone else a few days ago, I had no idea who ran this forum until about a week or two ago - I could see that there were a lot of people who spend their lives in tech, but I did not know any actual names in the VC space or the reason for the forum's existence. I could also see that there were a lot of people who I don't agree with, but that for the most part, everyone stays civil.

Make no mistake, this place is a marvel. There are factions here which I disagree with at an extremely fundamental level, but the worst that happens to me is I occasionally get some downvotes if I cuss. I got like twenty more fake internet points this morning. This place is great, period.

That said, there are a lot of folks who hang out here that look to me like they are terminally infected with The Mindset.

I know a fair number of HN participants in person, and a much larger number online but out-of-band. As a rule they're pretty knowledgeable within their field, and nice people in line with their HN persona. I've seen all kinds of beautiful stuff here, projects that get off the ground friendships, altruism and extreme effort to clarify things sometimes in the face of unreasonable assumptions and worse. HN really is special. But it is also very fragile and the degree to which this is the case is probably not much appreciated.

It would be good if people realized that HN can't go the way of Reddit because it doesn't have a financial goal other than to attract the best in the industry to generate the next batch of founders. But if HN were a profit motivated institution, if it had to compete for funding and if it had to do ad sales, broaden the offering and maintain a thousand and one relationships with other businesses I have absolutely no doubt the character would be destroyed before the week is out and you'd have another Reddit on your hand the week after.

Doing this as a niche site is relatively easy and relatively efficient on a manpower level. To operate the #18 website in the world (which is where Reddit is) whilst everybody is second guessing your every move isn't easy. I've ran a large forum myself (1M+ users) and it was always a balancing act, groups of users that hate each other, power trips by individuals who believe the site is about them and so on. I've seen all of that and then some, so I don't envy the people running Reddit.

This forum does have nuanced thought, from some users, some of the time.

But I wouldn't say that's the case for the majority of comments on complex, charged, and/or politicized issues. Most of us are morons about most things; and most of the time we don't even know it.

And it's the two paid, full-time mods here who keep things here less toxic than Reddit and the like.

This issue is very clear - Huffman is 100% in the wrong. He's been caught lying about some very serious issues, like utterly falsely claiming blackmail - and then doubled and tripled down it. He has made his character known over the years, un-personing Swartz, editing users comments for giggles, letting bots and advertisers swarm the site, etc.

Most mods AND communities on Reddit are against these changes, strongly, and have made that abundantly clear.

> And it's the two paid, full-time mods here who keep things here less toxic than Reddit and the like.

Afaik that is just one and the community helps out as well.

I highly doubt any of the comments here are from people who want to invest in the IPO and think badmouthing mods will help them.

Honestly, most of the dislike for the way that mods run Reddit is from simply running into the types of things mods on Reddit do. A few examples off the top of my head:

- The current blackout, where for most subs (all the subs I've visited, and every one I've checked), the decision to shut down the subs was made completely by the mods and not the users.

- /r/boardgaming had a bunch of mods that wanted to go into users history and ban them from /r/boardgaming if they didn't like their politics. The head mod objected, the other mods went on strike, then the head mod relented and let them do what they wanted.

- Recently saw a post on /r/centrist where half the posts where a mod disagreeing with people, and when the mod got downvoted they stickied a "you all are wrong and this is why we can't have good things" comment and then removed the whole thread.

- City subs banned any discussion of crime for a while, even when polls showed it the top concern for residents in a city.

- Mods of a large sub saying that users need to spend more time outside, so only mods would be allowed to make submissions over the summer.

- The whole drama with /r/workreform, where it was just created by a normal user after /r/antiwork fell apart. When it suddenly got huge, the user who created it was pushed out and it was taken over by powermods.

- /r/startrek mods banned people who didn't like new Star Trek show, then when those people started their own sub at /r/star_trek, they had the admins threaten to shut down the new sub if any user many any mention of the old sub (despite there being subs like /r/subredditdrama devoted to trashing other subs). Then they later got the entire sub shutdown for spurious reasons.

I could go on, but it's worth pointing out that the latter two are about how powerful mods work in conjunction with admins (many of who were previous mods) to shape things the platform the way they want. This is honestly a much bigger problem for the average use than the API stuff, since dissenting opinion is often hunted down and banned, and any somewhat large community gets pushed to be under the thumb of a small group of (frankly, rather unhinged) individuals.

Suffice to say, there's a lot to unpack in there, and I have a long list of yard tasks to get done. A lot of what you're describing is gonna happen everywhere, it happened on usenet, it happened in web forums, it has always happened.

Now I come from a different viewpoint than you, and I have had a certain kind of view about what you're discussing here as it relates to the internet since way before Reddit existed. One historical example for me was the Seymour Duncan (guitar pickup company) web forum. In theory, electric-guitar focused and the official rules said no politics. That said, it was a nest of late 90s internet right wingers, including the legendary Lord Valve, who you can look up and watch an interview where he's wearing a confederate hat, so.

I spoke up once or twice and got told no politics, while others were ranting about commies.

So might suggest that if you see this is a reddit-specific issue, that might indicate that you have been living in a different sort of bubble.

"No Politics" is always a shorthand for "No Politics I don't agree with".

> So might suggest that if you see this is a reddit-specific issue, that might indicate that you have been living in a different sort of bubble.

I never said it was a Reddit specific issue, so I'm not sure why you're reading that into the comment. The discussion here is about Reddit though, and there have been numerous posts here wondering why people are upset with Reddit mods, and saying that mods just keep the place clean, so I listed some examples off the top of my head about why people might not like many of the mods. In the past, when the topic has been broader, I’ve discussed this as an internet wide issue (the people who have the time to live online don’t tend to be the best socialized individuals).

The fact that bad behavior is common on the internet doesn’t mean bad behavior is not an issue.

An issue that has no relevance to the discussion of silos vs fediverse. If anything, the fedi is probably going to allow for slightly more actual free speech in the end; nobody is gonna kick Trump off truth.social, for instance, and people who are into that sort of thing still get to have a community, whatever mainline Mastodon might think about that. I doubt r/the_donald is ever coming back.

You're absolutely right about all of that - and yet, I'm still on the mods side for this one.

Huffman is and always has been an absolute tool; in fact he's a big factor for much of what you're talking about.

And this is an awful policy, that make giant steps toward a level of enshittification that I won't tolerate.

There's a good number of Reddit mods that also run IRC chatrooms. There's a venn diagram there and it doesn't have an IPO slice.

> from people who are clearly planning to invest in the IPO.

It's not that, it's about siding with power and revelling in watching the uppity peasants get their due. I saw the same thing on HN during the Twitter and other tech company layoffs. Little sympathy for the workers, but lots of HR quarterbacking about "bullshit jobs".

You are the exception, not the rule. Overzealous or corporate owned reddit mods already killed the site for a lot of people. I feel bad for the mods of smaller communities, but I have no sympathy for most. I'm glad that people like you are walking away, you can make some other part of the internet a better place, or better yet, you can now devote your efforts to making some real place better.

> Who do you think the existing mods are?

People are always stepping up to be mods. Most shouldn't be.

The existing mods of successful subreddits are the ones who stepped up, should have been mods, and who demonstrated it by creating a successful community. If you replace those by random wannabe mods, on average the result will be bad.

> on average the result will be bad

And in many cases the results will be catastrophic. In other cases the people stepping up will have no idea what it actually means to moderate the subreddits of the larger sizes, and will subsequently fail.

> should have been mods

Saying "there is a decision by Reddit that I don't agree with, so I am going to take my entire community hostage in my fight against it" is definitely a sign that the mod needs to be replaced by someone more suitable for the role.

Mods should be servant to their community; and not use them for whatever purpose they see fit. It's a thankless, ungrateful job. But here is the trick: no one is forcing you to take it. If you think Reddit changes are the straw that broke the camel's back, and that it's not worth it anymore you do have an option: step down.

But taking a subreddit private decease of this is basically saying: "I'd rather have no community, rather than have a vibrant community with someone else in charge". It's a clear sign you should be removed from power ASAP.

Except that whole thing goes away when the users were polled vñanf voted in favor.

I'm not a mod. I used RiF. Same goes for many Apollo users and others.

The attempts to set forth the narrative by reddit are very basic but it remains to be seen if effective.

if you don't like what that the users of a sub (both unpaid moderating users and non-moderating users) decided to do with their sub, you can always start your own

honestly this is reminiscent of a certain group of people unhappy with the results of how The People voted in a certain election, and consequently complained that said results were illegitimate and should be overturned and the people they disagree with should be removed from power

The polls I have personally had a number of participants that was a single digit percent of the number of subscribers. Not exactly representative of the whole community.

If the participation rate in the US election was 3.5% because they announced it 3 days prior to the vote and only to a fraction of citizens, there would be good reason to be mad at the results

funny you should mention that, because said certain group of people who contest said election use the same argument, among others, to push the view that they're the true majority, and so the election there, too, should be overturned and the opposite result instated, just with different arbitrary selected and ultimately meaningless thresholds

if you ask me, all those nonvoters would have voted to close down the subreddit. I'd guess you think differently, but since they didn't vote, we'll never know, and they don't count for either. Maybe you should have rallied all the nonvoters to your side?

and, if the result had been the opposite, would the same people be similarly rallying to have the vote overturned and flipped to "blackout" due to the low "turnout"? I doubt it.

>Saying "there is a decision by Reddit that I don't agree with, so I am going to take my entire community hostage in my fight against it" is definitely a sign that the mod needs to be replaced by someone more suitable for the role.

Yet I'm not hearing Reddit talk about hiring professional moderators

>Mods should be servant to their community

Why? They're not working for a charity. If Reddit expects free servants, there's regulations on things like internships, which Reddit doesn't appear to be remotely in compliance with. Servants generally get paid when working at for-profit companies or are otherwise subject to specific labor laws for things like internships. How many IPO shares are Reddit's servants getting?

>But taking a subreddit private decease of this is basically saying: "I'd rather have no community, rather than have a vibrant community with someone else in charge". It's a clear sign you should be removed from power ASAP.

Yet there is a long history of labor strikes. Reddit could find itself facing a class action lawsuit by ex-moderators over unpaid wages. The more Reddit gets itself involved in managing free labor, the more it exposes itself to liability.

It is survival of the fittest kind of thing for online communities, or survivorship bias. Darwin would like to have a word or two.

There's more: to the extent that Reddit corporate jumps at the chance to accept all these people, it will be replacing the 'currently stable' moderation environment with a substantial class of ringers, where we don't know their intentions other than they are prepared to back Reddit's power move here.

This is potentially a Twitter-like implosion, if they go there. Far from having major subreddits taken over by companies (which likely have no idea this is happening and have no motivation to suddenly supply social media volunteers), it's gonna be major subreddits taken over by kittens in blenders and 4chan-like behavior.

There's common factors among folks like this, and one is that they can be coordinated. I think it much more likely that Reddit gets taken over by conspiracy theorists and terrorists, than, for instance, hippies. Some will be very pleased at the result, but then some are really pleased at what's happened to Twitter (as long as you ignore the valuation, that is)

Lucid comment. Yes, always approach moderator, admin, other similar role candidates first. Some of the ones asking are going to be great. The trouble lies with the rest, who should never have the role.

Long ago, that was how I became a sysadmin. I still remember some of the talks. Great stuff on how to take good care of users, systems, other things.

On Reddit, people asking to moderate has generally been a bust in my experience.

I think you nailed it with this comment - there is a long line of folks who are waiting for open mod positions.

As a general principle, people in that line self-identify as unsuitable for the role and should not be given it, unless your goal is to destroy the community.

Which I guess is fine for Reddit - people will escape bad mods by forking subreddits off, and things will eventually settle down. Just don't expect your favorite subreddits to be there once the dust settles.

> There are Reddit users waiting in the wings, wringing their hands ready to jump at the 'oppurtunity' to moderate established subreddits and will happily devote their time to custodial duties.

You mean "4 chan users salivating at the idea of trolling reddit" ?

Is 4chan living rent free in your head?

or it's just a fun stand in for "mentally unwell racist person"

You mean 'controlling' reddit. Folks like this have had tastes of power before. If you think about it, knowing that Reddit is a feeder to ChatGPT, it could be a strategic move to try and make it so that all the AIs of the future default to 4chan mindset.

Bold if true! Heck of a motivation.

And Reddit as it stands is clearly not optimal for delivering this, but with enough dedicated mods power-modding the heck out of everything, maybe it COULD be the ideal source data for the ultimate 4chan artificial intelligence…

I would be only mildly surprised if some group of channers would plan that. Despite their toxicity, they are the most focused and determined group I have ever seen. So bad it is always for destructive purposes. They could have been great people.

4channers are remarkably resourceful and effective at times, if any group could manage such an ambitious task as poisoning all LLM AIs it would be them. I've heard it described as weaponized autism.

You make some good points but if there's one fatal flaw these big tech CEOs and their boards seem to have it's hubris. Reddit doesn't have a moat and it also doesn't have data that's amazingly interesting. This may very well be part of a power play by Huffman but he's forgotten the only two things that really matter at the end of the day, which are quality and volume/scale. Screwing his mods hurts him on both of those counts, because bottom line is it will result in people leaving and putting their energy into rival projects. Tech giants can and do fall and it almost always happens because they lose sight of those two things which matter and get embroiled in their own internal political navel-gazing BS. If he is sacrificing quality and scale for anything he's slowly signing the death warrant of the business he manages.

Mind you this may even be intentional - "let's move this business into the maturation phase where it continually gets shittier and our margins get higher until it collapses and we sell it off or something" is a completely normal and regular strategy, happens all the time, businesses exist to make money for their owners. All businesses go through three phases, growth, maturity, and decline. But as a user or consumer if you see it moving toward the end of the cycle it's usually in your best interest to get the hell out sooner rather than later.

> Reddit doesn't have a moat

Reddit has a tremendous moat. Like any social network, its users are the moat. Its usability has gotten worse in the past few years but there simply aren't great alternatives. (Federated services like Lemmy are not serious reddit alternatives.)

Well it's the long tail of high-effort users, comments, subreddits, that are the moat. The vast majority of content is replaceable by tiktok, twitter, etc...

Users are a pretty weak moat. We know this because if they were a good one, Reddit wouldn't exist. We'd all still be on Myspace or Digg or wherever. Apple, Microsoft, Google, those guys have moats. Leaving their ecosystems is HARD. Leaving Myspace, Digg, Facebook or Reddit just because there are less users somewhere else isn't really that big of a loss. Once people have a good alternative they do it pretty quickly. The history of rapid turnover in social media giants compared to other tech sectors is the proof.

If you wanted to be edgy I think you could even argue users are an anti-moat for social media because they age, become uncool, and then the next generation doesn't want to hang out in your uncool boomer space and goes somewhere else. This is FB's current predicament.

It's not much of a moat if Reddit hasn't derived a single cent of profit from it.

While I agree that the situation described is excessive, good mods are non fungible, a mod will have to take unpopular decisions, and act according to experience to determine a best path to follow, what the mod team does determines the kind of discussion to be had in the platform and who's allowed to have it

It's the reason subs will look for "experienced mods", there's a learning curve and a taste you'll have to develop, specially with smaller communities

> There are Reddit users waiting in the wings, wringing their hands ready to jump at the 'oppurtunity' to moderate established subreddits and will happily devote their time to custodial duties.

Either those people will be bad mods who will shepherd their communities into further decline, or many of them will eventually come around to the position that Reddit's changes are bad for mods.

There's nothing magic about the current batch of mods other than that they got there first. The same things that affected their perspective will affect the perspective of their replacements.