it turns out, the communities and their members (mod and non-mod) are more valuable to reddit than vice versa
without reddit, the communities could exist on any other forum software, hosting paid by anyone else, and be the same
without the communities, reddit is worthless
So what do you call that economic system in which individual people volunteer to improve privately owned property and the only “compensation” is simply the opportunity to use/improve private property.
And again, unlike sharecropping, volunteers get zero of the property as fiat to convert.
Preemptively there’s no possible pathway to claim that Reddit is a “Public Commons”, because nobody but the legal owners and their designated controllers, determine the distribution of value or future of the property.
Mods can Just Quit. They can go self-host. Nobody is making them use Reddit. This isn't a labor situation where anyone's livelihood is at stake.
And yet, I still basically can't watch ANY DAMN VIDEO on the site now that I can't use 3P clients, yes, years after it's introduction the video player is still worse than stepping in dog shit.
It's a database, some over engineered piles of JS to load a list of links, and by reddits own messaging, a crap API. It's really not special. The mods and users made it what it is, in spite of what it is.
> Reddit then that anyone can create a subreddit on. It'll probably be better, right?
I've never had a topic like reddit get people so eager to shove words in my mouth. REDDIT GOT LUCKY and maybe were calculating it how they used free labor. They didn't make anything, they have no unique value prop after losing power users and moderators.
And despite what some funny people here say, the frontpage is a laughingstock still. When I peek once a week, because yes, I actually have some self-wilp and self-determination and feel no need to prop up shitty little platforms run by shitty lying little dictators. I know, shocking that some of us have values, and we even live them.
Instead of creating more strawmans to put in my mouth, why not actually rise to the discussion and tell me what reddit has that no one else can touch. I think you've conceded it's not tech.
To act like Reddit-the-product is valueless and did nothing right to get to where it is today is just silly.
Let's not act like Reddit itself hasn't been extremely valuable to these communities. It's just untrue that the mods do the only important work to build subreddits.
A lot of subs I'm in have low touch mods and I'm fairly sure if they didn't do it someone else easily would have. Hasn't dropped them from thinking they had fiat power and rights to shut down the subreddit despite many active users wishing to continue using Reddit.