I mean, looking at trends of any company and the fact that Reddit is about to IPO it’s only a matter of time before they ban the ability for community members to mod subreddits.
Why would anyone do free work for a corporation to profit off of?
I used to be a mod at /r/soccer.
I used it when it was a wild-west shitshow full of the same old posts. I used it for a decade, and when they needed mods in my timezone I thought I’d use the time I was gifted thanks to COVID and redundancy to help out.
Most mods have very little power, and a lot of scrutiny if there are more than a few mods. It’s just a queue you occasionally look at to see what has been reported, and you action it based on the rules.
Yes, you have described performing work. Many people do the same, but with emails, and get paid.
For 10ish mins a day? Sign me up to that job!
Out of interest, how do you see it as any different to being a mod on Lemmy?
Not OC but they’re just pointing out that one is free work for a corporation that just paid two people nearly $200 million off your back. Whereas Lemmy moderation is currently just volunteer work in the interest of community. Not saying people can’t profit off of community facilitation, but in that case their moderators are staff and should be treated as such.
On Reddit they’re profiting off your work. On lemmy, we’re all poor together!
Haha last time I checked, Reddit had never turned a profit.
While I do get your point, I think most mods see a connection to a community or subject, rather than the company that owns the platform. In my view, it’s no worse than when people maintained DMOZ, or people that contribute to Wikipedia.
The difference I see is that Lemmy mods have all the tools they want as they can code or request tools. Help the community for free and support something they love.
Meanwhile on Reddit, you cant have shit, get to see how greedy the ceo is and see your community crumble as more and more bots are coming afaik. The fact that they want to profit off of you makes you feel more like thats not right.
Perhaps right now, but the Reddit API had all the tools I needed to run scripts to stop spammers using their own scripts.
Just because you don’t like Reddit, it doesn’t mean you should devalue how people use their time.
Especially when working for projects like Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap is way more rewarding
I moderated a mid sized sub for a while. Around 100k users. It was a hobby I was into and I figured may as well moderate because I was spending a lot of time on the sub anyways. It also let me put together some community events which were always fun. Once it stopped being fun and started feeling like a job, I left. I never really thought about it as doing free work for reddit and more helping community building for a hobby I had. People do it for all sorts of reasons. The “power mods” are really the issue.
I understand back when Reddit was small and before they killed all their good will, but I don’t see why anyone would continue to be a mod now that Reddit has made it clear that they want to monetize their work.
Because there are still some great communities on Reddit that don’t exist in the same way elsewhere.
They’re paid in ego boosts. Unfortunately, it means that the types of mods that have hung on are largely the type that like to be paid in ego boosts.
Why would anyone invest in a corporation that doesn’t pay it’s workers who were also given the keys to parts of the business and can lock down sections of the business at any given moment.
Why would anyone invest in something so volatile.
It’s only value will come when they finally make the announcement and launch the IPO … after that it will be worthless.
Nothing can really kill reddit, but as far as content goes I expect it will follow the same path facebook did where the only people who eventually really interact on it will be conspiracy theorists and moms.
Bankruptcy can kill Reddit. Give the C-suite some credit, they can still drive that sucker straight into the ground.
Its a good thing the Moderators famously fumbled their one attempt at protesting for anything significant to reddit
They should’ve just stopped moderating in mass. If Reddit wants to replace them that’s fine, they’ll just need to replace all of them at once.
They did and Reddit installed puppets in the bigger subs.
They didn’t as I was there
stopped moderating en* masse*
I like that your useless account doesn’t even have the apostrophe in its name. It’s odd to me you spend time doing this. It’s no tits shouldn’t waste time correcting it’s and its!
It’s* a good thing
I actually want to know why people comment pedantic grammar corrections, are you trying to be helpful or does it give some sense of superiority?
I really don’t know what could kill Reddit at this point. It’s so different now with Reddit’s new UI, the awards, blocking VPN connections, and Reddit licensing user content for AI training. We saw how things went with the blackout and how so many people caved instantly and were willing to fill the roles of the people that left once subreddits were forced back open.
Maybe blocking NSFW content or requiring users to verify their age?
Can’t kill what is already dead.
The communities are all but gone.
The signal to noise ratio is the worst it’s ever been.
Most subs are barely moderated. Actual mod involvement (as opposed to Automod) is low.
Reddit now openly collects and sells user data.
The Reddit we knew is dead and gone.
The only place I’ve seen that still has some life and great energy is r/comics. If lemmy’s version(s) of that group could attract the regular content creators I wouldn’t have any other reason to visit reddit.
Reddit now openly collects and sells user data.
With Sam Altman as shareholder #4 I think we got sold out long ago. The only real surprise is that Reddit got some compensation…
Accounts made using TOR are also shadowbanned
And I’m pretty sure Reddit still has an .onion version.
Fuck yeah, fuck its business. Fuck reddit for going IPO and Fuck spez for being an insufferable gaping asshole
“Could hurt its business”
Apparently we didn’t do much. I’m just happy to be on Lemmy so I don’t have to care.
Lol yeah, tired of people coming over here, lurking (not posting or commenting), and complaining there isn’t much content to consume.
Huh? Those are two vastly different groups. You can’t not comment or post AND complain about it. Those who complain are those who comment and/or post. Those who lurk either don’t interact at all or upvote/downvote only.
They lurk and then they complain if that makes sense. They only seem to do it if asked what they think about Lemmy though so at least it’s not everywhere. Usually people who were banned from Reddit and linger around her till it runs up or people trying it for the first time and disappointed no one is talking about movies or something so they can’t just get involved in a vibrant conversation.
I encourage them to get involved too, post what ever they like, to leave a comment nomater how insignificant it might seem. I get no response what so ever from them. I even make the point that reddit was this small at one point but it was the community that grew it.
What sucks is that on most social media platforms about 10% of users make the content that draws people in. The rest are typically lurking and contributing little to platform growth but are still important to platform monetization. Not important to Lemmy but still.
The last one showed four important things:
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It can be coordinated super easily and has broad support amongst the mods
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It’s popular with most users outside of sports subreddits and they’re hostile toward scab mods and admins.
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Reddit fundamentally has zero response to it and anything they try compounds their issues. They can’t offer mods anything short of the wage that 24/7 customer service job for a multi-billion dollar company should entail. They can’t censor the protests without it causing a Streisand effect and major backlash which reinforces points 1 and 2.
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Mods don’t have any control over the subreddit anyway. It’s arbitrarily taken away and given to anyone who asks for it. The only consequence for anyone protesting is reddit saying you can’t do the volunteer work that you’re protesting over the conditions of already. The next schmuck still has to do that work with those conditions knowing reddit hates them just as much as they hated you.
I think the next mod strike is the breaking point for the website. They’re going to have a worse response, people are going to be angrier, and the shareholders are going to add a whole new layer of demands that can’t be enforced without making everything worse for mods and users. Once that mod exodus hits, the website instantly becomes unusable and full of wildly illegal things. There’s no Plan B for that which isn’t very expensive.
Another blackout during their IPO would certainly send their stock prices off to a good start…
That might happen but that’s not where the real pressure point is. Sometime shortly after the IPO, whatever hype exists around it is going to give way to the reality that reddit is an unprofitable company at the end of a tech bubble built on 0% interest rates that aren’t coming back. There is no way for reddit to become profitable without making itself unusable and sanitising the NSFW content that drives a huge amount of its traffic. When the price tanks, they’ve bribed their 75k most loyal users and mods into accepting the IPO with advanced purchase options at what might be the high point of its value. That’s when shit stands to rupture. Reddit will have failed everyone to enrich Steve Huffman and the venture capitalists who invested in their earlier rounds and there’s no way for them to control that tantrum spiral.
Pretty sure most subreddits that put it to a vote had the userbases support the blackouts as well.
r/snackexchange was fun. I sabotaged the subreddit by embracing Spez’s call for user democracy, making everything about it up for a vote every day. Some weird little goober ratfucked that and the admins made them the head mod, despite them only participating in the subreddit one time ten years before and there being two existing mods who programmed third-party tools we were protesting for. Those tools were necessary for running the subreddit. The users instantly turned on this guy despite me being a more or less absent mod for years and destroying the subreddit in protest. He became a proxy for the admins and caught so much flak that he has only posted a couple times since, and not in r/snackexchange.
There were a few larger subreddits that got mod couped with similar hate toward the scabs, but having seen the worst case example it’s great. They do their big power move and it’s the
gun. When they threatened to do it in r/Science the guy requesting it was an antivaxxer who markets herbal supplements. Let a thousand fuckups bloom.
But one thing it also demonstrated was peoples will for power and recognition, no matter how small. They enjoy being mods, it makes them feel above others, so there will always be someone willing to trade morals to take the position.
During the previous blackout protest (Vaxxhappened) my sub was a big pusher for going dark, and the biggest hurdle in convincing other mods to join the cause was… fear they would be removed.
It was then that I had my “If there was hope, it must lie in the proles” realization that nothing would change. I had assumed most mods cared more about their communities than the platform they were hosted on, but aside from a scant few that was a mistake.
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Besides having their community migrate to Lemmy, the thing moderators can do that impacts reddit the most is making their sub NSFW, because
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Reddit gets no ad revenue from NSFW subs, and
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NSFW subs will be excluded from their new $60m/year AI training deal.
I imagine if mods changed subs to NSFW for actually non-NSFW subs that those mods will be replaced with bootlickers with boots so far up their ass they can taste them.
This actually happened. Mods werde forced to turn back to SFW or they would have been removed
And some mods stuck to their guns and were removed and replaced by bootlickers.
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I modded a few subreddits but left it all behind
I just remembered the other day I’m listed as the only moderator of a subreddit with a couple thousand users and haven’t done anything for it in about a year.
Me too. I had really hoped more mods would move their communities to a Lemmy instance and promote it on Reddit but that’s largely not the case.
Rip their fucking eyes out
Reverse psychology Uno card attempt to get any remaining mod or community they don’t control to out themselves as a risk and be ousted, imo.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The company also said that bad publicity and media coverage, such as the kind that stemmed from the API protests, could be a risk to Reddit’s success.
The Form S-1 said bad PR around Reddit, including its practices, prices, and mods, “could adversely affect the size, demographics, engagement, and loyalty of our user base,” adding:
Reddit’s filing also said that negative publicity and moderators disrupting the normal operation of subreddits could hurt user growth and engagement goals.
Reddit’s filing discusses losing moderators as a business risk and notes how important third-party tools are in maintaining mods:
Any disruption to, or lack of availability of, these third-party tools could harm our moderators’ ability to review content and enforce community rules.
Nondisclosure agreement requirements and the lack of a finalized developer platform also drive uncertainty around the longevity of the third-party Reddit app ecosystem, according to devs Ars spoke with this year.
The original article contains 647 words, the summary contains 150 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Reddit needs to die
Moderators simultaneously make reddit better and worse… mostly worse, though.
A lot worse. Was tired of the [removed] trope whenever mods did something incredibly stupid.
