When forced to make a choice between power or their principles, Reddit moderators are overwhelmingly choosing to abandon the latter.
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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That's not really fair. I mean, it is for some, but for most of us, we're just caught in a shitty situation.
I mod (or modded, I suppose) for a medium-sized city subreddit, and it's used for things like news about missing persons, job openings, safety hazards, special events, and so on. Things that are of interest to the actual, physical community. It's an online mirror of our city that took years to develop.
That's really hard to just abandon. At the same time, most of the mods were using RIF or Apollo to stay on top of spammers, trolls, scams, and other objectionable content, and now we're stuck with either the half-baked, laggy, crash-prone nonsense of the official app, or the desktop website.
Neither is any good for properly moderating a busy, active subreddit from a phone. It can't be done.
So mods who care about their communities are trying their best to hold them together while finding a way to protest these changes, and it sucks for everyone involved.
And a lot are working on leaving Reddit and trying to build communities here on Lemmy instead.
Reddit is dying now. It's going to be slow, and it's going to involve mods trying to save their communities for a while, but I don't think anything is really going to save it from this mortal, self-inflicted wound. Give it time... Lemmy is getting better daily, while Reddit is getting worse. And cut the mods who care more about their communities than they do about the specific platform those communities reside on some slack. It's a shitty situation all around.
I wish people would take a more subtle approach. Have a pinned post saying that mods have moved the community to the lemmy one with the link, and have a bot reply to new posts saying the community has shifted and how to post there with a few linked resources. I've seen this strategy used successfully in many subreddits to get people to discord or some other platform.
I remember when the female dating strategy sub did this rather successfully.
They were about to get banned anyway for the incel-like behaviour and took it upon themselves to switch platforms.
Peak irony if we use their strategy too :)
Are they really? They dedicate their free time to give reddit their power. Reddit is now yelling at them to give power back to themselves despiteb years of saying the opposite.
I thought people on the Fediverse would be more appreciative of people doing volunteer work to maintain online communities but seems like a lot of users only think of mods when they get moderated or banned, not when the community is healthy and free from garbage.
The minor power trip seems to be the only reason a large number became mods to begin with.
It is rather short-sighted. There is no way Reddit could easily replace all of the moderators, and it would be chaos if they removed all of them at once, but Reddit threatening them works because they know they're scared of losing control of their communities.
Don’t you see? It could put the community at risk!!
Reddit mods are so sad.
Oh, no! Not being removed from a voluntary unpaid job that saves Reddit millions every year!
*Removes NSFW tags, places NSFW content anyway.
Hopefully it lands next diaper or detergent...
God how bad would that be... Big company paying spez and he places their product next to thicc young lady with big titties... The horror!
As I understand it, the sub being flagged NSFW as a whole means Reddit can't sell ads on it, whereas general subs with NSFW content are considered fine (like AskReddit, where "what's the sexiest sex you've ever sexed?" comes up about twice a week). The subs would need to be flooded with NSFW content that is upvoted above anything SFW for several days and a campaign to highlight this to advertisers to effect change in this way, and I'm sure the admins would yell at them before it got that far and the moderators would crumble again.
Oh no. Who will I work for free then?
Doesn't ~~fuck~~ spez know the meaning of the word volunteer? Mods Don't depend on reddit, is the other way around.
Mods are like game devs, the powers that be know they can treat them like absolute shit because there is an endless supply of replacements who are willing to be treated like shit for the opportunity to do the work.
And nowadays most AAA games are shit. And the best games are indie games made be good developers that got tired of being treated like shit.
That is untrue. Reddit would do just fine without their mods. Mods dont moderate subreddits out of the goodness of their heart to volunteer their time. They do it because they like having power over their communities. Reddit is threatening to take away that power from them, which is why they all crumbled so fast. It is unbelievably easy to find new people to take power over an internet community.
The fact that reddit keeps making threats to moderators instead of taking immediate action is interesting. I guess they realize they'd be screwed without all that volunteer labor.
Reddit is afraid of its users. They know that being heavy handed on one will cause a way bigger backlash. Doing it to a few subs already caused the protest to swell.
Reddit is gambling - so far correctly - that the mods care too much about the subreddits they've spent years building and maintaining to walk away, so they will cave on any protests as soon as the admins get involved.
The only way this will have any real impact is "good" moderators walk away and leave the running of the key ad-friendly subs to newbie inexperienced moderators who will cause serious damage.
Reddit mods want to be activists and be a part of this, but they are too afraid of losing the tiny irrelevant piece of power they have to actually do anything.
Zany theory time - NSFW is not available via API as complete removal of NSFW content is on the roadmap, and they don't want the app developers building a subscription model around something that will disappear in future.
As if they give a crap about app developers.
If the theory were true, it would have nothing to do with caring about app developers, but protecting a revenue stream.
It is unlikely, but why else would they limit NSFW content from third parties? If they outright want to extinguish them why bother implementing any sort of API cost model - as you said, it's not like they care the app developers.
Or maybe a new (monetized) platform for NSFW content? They're just eliminating competition.
LELAND: Well, I’m sorry. There’s just no way that we could keep you on. KRAMER: I don’t even really work here!
That's what makes this so difficult
What's crazy is that Reddit admins have so much more to lose by removing these moderators than the mods themselves do, but the mods have somehow convinced themselves that they have to stay, no matter how bad it is.
Relevant article: https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf
Most mods of large subs are addicted to power, even if it's just a facade
Of course they are, it’s all about how much revenue they’re losing from the subreddits NSFW tags as advertisers don’t like it. We’ll see if they actually go through with it.
Theoretically, for a large sub like pics or military, if every mod held strong and was removed, would Reddit step in and find moderators or moderate themselves?
They have done so already for a few subs where a few of the mods were willing to budge. In others, all mods were removed and the subs were made restricted.
Good bye Reddit, I deleted my profile to never return. XD