A lot of people are probably tired of the Reddit related posts. But I found this article from the EFF, and it does give a fairly balanced overview of the entire issue and where things stood yesterday.
A lot of people are probably tired of the Reddit related posts. But I found this article from the EFF, and it does give a fairly balanced overview of the entire issue and where things stood yesterday.
I do like being a mod, and hate it. With a good automod dev to stop the worst of it it was manageable. If/when tildes gets big they will have to do that same. No way an admin team can mod all of...
I do like being a mod, and hate it. With a good automod dev to stop the worst of it it was manageable. If/when tildes gets big they will have to do that same. No way an admin team can mod all of it. Also a good way to hopefully keep the company from fucking up if users can tell the company no to what they are doing.
I don't know if he already has, but I would imagine it exists in some capacity already. After all Deimos is the creator of what is now Reddit's Automoderator.
With a good automod dev to stop the worst of it it was manageable. If/when tildes gets big they will have to do that same.
I don't know if he already has, but I would imagine it exists in some capacity already. After all Deimos is the creator of what is now Reddit's Automoderator.
I posted a bit of info about it the other day. Like many other things, it's not fleshed out at this point (and doesn't need to be yet), but the foundation is there and it would be far more capable...
I posted a bit of info about it the other day. Like many other things, it's not fleshed out at this point (and doesn't need to be yet), but the foundation is there and it would be far more capable than AutoMod.
It lets you write full-on scripts in Lua for processing posts, which is more complex than configuring AutoMod in some ways, but a lot of the AutoMod stuff ended up being more complex than actual programming anyway.
as a Lua lover (both the language and the natural satellite) i absolutely adore the idea of having access to Lua scripting in automod… the way reddit's automod works feels so janky.
as a Lua lover (both the language and the natural satellite) i absolutely adore the idea of having access to Lua scripting in automod… the way reddit's automod works feels so janky.
Ooo lua, I have seen lua code but not messed with it for work. Maybe something I should dig into. I did read your post about separate groups. hopefully when that comes around could you give some...
Ooo lua, I have seen lua code but not messed with it for work. Maybe something I should dig into. I did read your post about separate groups. hopefully when that comes around could you give some time for subreddits to grab names before general users?
I don't even really like being a mod, I just care about the communities I've taken 'responsibility' for and either don't trust someone else to do it, or think that my help is needed. Being...
I don't even really like being a mod, I just care about the communities I've taken 'responsibility' for and either don't trust someone else to do it, or think that my help is needed.
Being everyone's Bad Guy fucking blows and there's no way to moderate without being the bad guy because ultimately the majority of the role is one of either taking people's posts/comments down, or telling them off for breaking the rules. No one likes having their post taken down, no one likes being told off - even when it's deserved.
As far as "trust" I think it's worth clarifying;
One community I mod(ded) on Reddit is very prone to commercial attempts at manipulation, and for a very diffuse industry with a lot of little ties and connections - we've already had issues with people seeking modship so they can favour a company they're connected to, and we've definitely had issues where companies offer money to receive priority treatment.
Another is a subject that has a lot of contention around it and some politics strongly adjacent - the folks most motivated to mod are also prone to wanting to shift tone & content towards the politics side of things and away from the topic at the core, while the community as a whole has asked repeatedly that the community not become a political circlejerk.
I guess that's what I like too, being responsible for the community. I know a lot of hate gets thrown to mods but you can see the difference between no mod and mod is stark.
I guess that's what I like too, being responsible for the community. I know a lot of hate gets thrown to mods but you can see the difference between no mod and mod is stark.
As someone that went to reddit after the digg 4.0 crash, I've always wondered how much money is infused in popular subreddits. On the other side of things, the news reddit, doesn't have a lot of...
As someone that went to reddit after the digg 4.0 crash, I've always wondered how much money is infused in popular subreddits. On the other side of things, the news reddit, doesn't have a lot of news, which is weird. Maybe a couple dozen articles a day, which seems like there is a lot more news in a day. Worldnews is the same.
I know that there's a ton of opportunity, if you're in a community that faces the correct subject matter. We're not big enough that we get very many offers, but I can also readily see that I could...
I know that there's a ton of opportunity, if you're in a community that faces the correct subject matter.
We're not big enough that we get very many offers, but I can also readily see that I could make a decent side-profit by soliciting conflicts of interest. I know that we'd probably get more direct offers if it was more public that our time and attention were available to purchase.
Which I think cuts two ways - if I and all the other people I work with have all managed to resist the temptations, it's fair to say that other people outside my sphere probably do the same. At the same time, knowing what's been offered my way, I can absolutely see the flip side of that coin - where the temptation is present, has a number on it, and everyone does ultimately have their price. I can acknowledge that deep down, if someone offered me a big enough number, I'd absolutely trade my integrity on the internet for life-changing real-world money. After the cheque cleared.
On the other side of things, the news reddit, doesn't have a lot of news, which is weird. Maybe a couple dozen articles a day, which seems like there is a lot more news in a day. Worldnews is the same.
I feel like some of what's hit them is that community members like to demand that this or that thing be banned, and over time too much accession to those demands can result in banning the bulk of possible content. The pace of content there has been on slow decline over the years and as a result of years and years of small tightenings to content - banning blog farms, banning content-farm 'news' sites, banning 'misinformation' news, banning duplicate coverage ... etc. Each change being wholly reasonable in isolation, but also net turning off the majority of possible submissions.
I also mod a smaller, academic, community and there's very low content there day-to-day and I already have a decent list of what I'm supposed to remove, and we also have meta discussions from time to time where the community really wants "more content" and also for me to remove most of what remains. In their case, no one submits the stuff they want to see, but they want one of the two types of discussion post still allowed to be removed in addition to all the other stuff - as if having next to no content will make other people post the stuff they want to see.
What happens IMO is that as content locks down, what remains can get more and more repetitive, until people ask to have that boring content removed as well. IE: once you've banned news from blog rings and content farms, then the multiple news sites' stories all about the same big story from that day get more and more annoying - because there's no other content to pad out the feed.
Thanks for the write up. Makes sense. But when I hit /news I just want to read the old school paper when I wake up with my tea. But nope. It has to be curated and drama filled. Bummer.
Thanks for the write up. Makes sense. But when I hit /news I just want to read the old school paper when I wake up with my tea. But nope. It has to be curated and drama filled. Bummer.
I appreciate this article. It's really good to see articles like this on respected sites such as EFF. It also gives more exposure to decentralized platforms. I'm on a few federated services, and...
I appreciate this article. It's really good to see articles like this on respected sites such as EFF. It also gives more exposure to decentralized platforms. I'm on a few federated services, and the excitement there is refreshing.
this is a fantastic summary and very well organized and written. as the article is written by the eff, and links to background knowledge link to eff's analysis of previous websplosions like fark,...
this is a fantastic summary and very well organized and written. as the article is written by the eff, and links to background knowledge link to eff's analysis of previous websplosions like fark, and digg, it's solid information and very digestible.
this would be a great article to pass to the untechnical folks in your life.
i know, just like creesch says ”people are probably getting tired of the reddit related posts”, and i agree. i am, however, still getting messages frequently from various contacts pretty much asking the same thing:
”what's going on with reddit? when will it go back to normal?”
”why is reddit suddenly sucking and i can't find vr-tech answers anymore?”
and
”can i still ask you questions about my vr problems?”
at least i have a good way to answer the first question: with a link to op's eff article. unfortunately i have to answer the training query: reddit very likely won't be returning to normal.
as for the rest, maybe it's time for me to graduate from long-form rambling reddit posts on technology and move on to writing actual articles and try to publish them somewhere. perhaps self-publishing via medium.com or youtube... but i'd much rather share the very limited revenue (if any) if someone else was working on promotion, like at an existing publication: self promotion is not my strong suit.
not yet, thank you! i've downloaded all my posts from the reddit ”download all your data” options and received a zip of a bunch of .csv files. the zip was like 25-35mb of text :) my next step is...
not yet, thank you!
i've downloaded all my posts from the reddit ”download all your data” options and received a zip of a bunch of .csv files. the zip was like 25-35mb of text :)
my next step is to toss it in a postgres db and quickly build a tool to spyder the threads for context and fill out to postgres db.
^^^: that's the time critical bit, so i'll do that this weekend and just hammer on it until it's done. after that i can look at hashnode.com and a federated blod service or something. i'll be picking your brain (if you don't mind) as while i get the underlying ideas, i haven't touched the federated net yet... yet /me:rubs-hands.gif /me:witchcackle.ogg
you can stop reading here as the rest is me venting and writing my nightly journal². right now in my live everything is complicated and bad bloody occuring simultaneously: i thought time was supposed to keep everything from happening all at once, but apparently time, she is derelict in her duties.
time is normally slippery for me: i'm a touch autistic, older, single, no kids, and happy because i can dedicate as much time as i want to my zillion or so hobbies. i've been bad at time my whole life: seconds, minutes, hours even... maaayybee today, tomorrow, and yesterday i can deal with. outside of that it's an abstraction. i'm in my late 40's and yesterday i was 12, the day before that 25.
i have a great memory that remembers things vividly, but all as separate episodes i have to figure out when happened by figuring out what happened before and what happened after. yes, spooling through my memory is much like walking a linked list.
don't laugh¹, but to figure out what year something happened, i listen to the music in the memory (when available) and work out years based on song release dates. srsly.
anywho, right now:
reddit is dying
i'm signing the papers on the sale of my house⁴ of 23 years because i have 13¢ in my bank account because Events⁵ and if i don't, the servicing company auctions the house without having to give me anything⁶
i need to be Out of my (former) house i put my soul into by july 8th.
so i get the house sale money (hopefully) today (friday). i have no working vehicle⁵.
i'm giving my tools to an old friend and his son. they would have got them if i died anyway. this way if i visit i can use my tools again. i was an avid woodworker (among a zillion hobbies)
getting my old band van fixed, getting it insured and registered and a/c fixed because it's arizonain the summer.
getting a storage unit, moving into it all the stuff i don't give away or donate⁷.
renting a cheap apartment. in that apartment go:
a few tatami mats, a futon, a pillow.
a very small amount if clothes, towels, kitchen stuff
my sword and my guitar
my computer and rack of servers. commercial internet if it will transfer
my full-body vr rig
I AM BECOME SNOWCRASH/CYBERPUNK
my best friend is about to give birth for the first time
i have had one or both feet/tendons/ligaments screwed up to the point movement has been troubles almost every week since christmas.
probably related to the accident in '18⁵ that started this train of bad shit. don't get me wrong: i bear a lot of responsibility... just not all.
aaand that's why.
but i'll get my data and its context off of reddit then nuke it, rest assured. it's a moral imperative.
footnotes
1: ok, well laugh yer arse off because it is bloody ridiculous, lols :)
2: i write my nightly journal entry whenever it's time to write and wherever i happen to be written if i'm already writing something. when it happens it's usually reddit, ⁸oftimes* telegram, and every now-and-then twitter. congratulations! it's your lucky night, dear reader, as this is tilde's inceptive krista-ramble³!
3: i bet i used inceptive incorrect. there's probably a number of spelling errors and wordsbglommed together like that as i'm using my tablet and tildes.net doesn't have my usual editing/proofing tools working with it yet. my 'pologies :(
4: more like bedroom/studio/theater/lab/workshop/development studio. it has a firepole from the loft to the multipurpose studio/theater room.
--=
5: i had a 2008 porsche cayman s i purchased in '13 and paid off in '18, one month before an suv blowing a red light at 65mph+ broadsided me sending me to the trauma center code yellow. to shorten a story i've told too many times: broken toes, knee, ankles, thumbs. lots of ribs flexing too much and cartilage damage. contused colon, intestines, spleen, liver, kidneys (one ruptured a bit), partially deflated right lung, lots of soft tissue damage (some spots are still numb), bloodshot eyes.
bad enough the paramedics didn't bother checking my car for quite some time. i can't blame them as it was splatter damage, and i wouldn't want to see part of a corpse either. i was crammed half under the remaining dash.
stopover in the trauma wards, lots of imaging. eventually got home and spent a few weeks pissing/crapping blood, ~6 months bedridden,~16 months pt/healing. still have oddities, including a full head of white hair i watched grow almost as a perfect line in my hair.
that day i decided to put down my vr research pre-startup (1.5 years) because i was running out of savings and went to get a taco bean burrito on the corner as condolences... plus i was starving. i never got that bean burrito. therefore car insurance, but no real medical.
after the lawyers, the tweenage kid was at fault. all of his insurance + my underinsured rider + value of my porsche wasn't enough to cover my medical bills + all my regular bills for 2 years, so i spent the rest of my savings, plus credit cards.
this dumped me into the middle of the plague without a job, a nearly 4 year gap (working on my pre-startup + healing + not finding work) making employment impossible to find for this 20+ year c/c++/asm/c#/basic ee+firmware and nearly everything else besides web pages girl.
i'm shitty at resumes and finding working + i prefer socializing in person + linkedin + kept previous job 13 years == krista is fucked and files bankruptcy a day before they were to auction my house.
i got an hourly job at my previous employer (small company, long story not for this evening, bad idea), had it until the new project i was on had everyone else quit or fired because it was fucked, asked to crunch and did so between dec26-jan26, got formal write up for working more than 40hr/wk. got fire in march, co-president (another long story for later).
cant find job, bankruptcy lawyer forgets to tell me that this breaks my bankruptcy agreement, and house goes for auction on may-19. i found out may-18.
call lawyer, give him my last $kilobuck, he is supposed to hold auction off untill find employment.
can't: despite tech experience, 'm bat at self promotion. was going to hire resume doctor, but lawyer took my last $kilobuck... and couldn't/wouldn't push auction beyond june 20th. he told me may 30th.
--=
6: after creative fees
7: i've a pretty nice gas infrared grill if anyone wants it, plus other tech stuff and maybe appliances. message me.
Lol, I moved to discord years ago at this point. Still don't like slack very much though. Discord I sort of got used to and serves it purpose for live communication. Don't very much like their...
Btw you were right the whole time about slack and discord, we all should have stayed on IRC
Lol, I moved to discord years ago at this point. Still don't like slack very much though. Discord I sort of got used to and serves it purpose for live communication. Don't very much like their push to appear more like a forum though as discord is about as closed as it gets.
I question the premise that Reddit got anything wrong. The strike is pretty much over, a handful of subs are striking forever but they'll be quickly replaced and the majority are coming back....
I question the premise that Reddit got anything wrong.
The strike is pretty much over, a handful of subs are striking forever but they'll be quickly replaced and the majority are coming back. Maybe Reddit expected less backlash, but the amount they got was fairly minimal and isn't going to have a real impact.
Similarly, looking at activity nothing has happened. Even during blackout people just used the remaining subreddits. The amount of users leaving has, at least temporarily, boosted this place and Fediverse, but it's not a remotely significant amount of the overall Reddit user base. The increase in ad revenue from more people using the official app will more than offset this loss.
Potentially in the future you could see moderator burnout become an issue, but there's always going to be more people willing to step up as a mod, so if burnout becomes faster or subs get slightly worse moderation it'll have a minimal big picture impact.
Tl;dr, I don't think Reddit actually got anything wrong, and if they could have seen the future they'd probably do the same thing over again
This is objectively untrue. Tons of subreddits are still private including 4 of the largest 7 by subscriber count, and many others have restricted permissions.
The strike is pretty much over, a handful of subs are striking forever but they'll be quickly replaced and the majority are coming back.
This is objectively untrue. Tons of subreddits are still private including 4 of the largest 7 by subscriber count, and many others have restricted permissions.
Where are you getting this from? I subscribe to around 900 subreddits and yesterday my front page was a ghost town. It's a little bit more populated today but still nothing like it was prior to...
Similarly, looking at activity nothing has happened. Even during blackout people just used the remaining subreddits.
Where are you getting this from? I subscribe to around 900 subreddits and yesterday my front page was a ghost town. It's a little bit more populated today but still nothing like it was prior to the blackout.
There's places you can track overall sitewide activity on Reddit, it was down a bit but not much. I have no clue which subreddits you subscribe to so maybe your personal front page was a ghost...
There's places you can track overall sitewide activity on Reddit, it was down a bit but not much.
I have no clue which subreddits you subscribe to so maybe your personal front page was a ghost town, but that was not the experience for 99% of users.
I don't think we can really say, yet, because we haven't actually seen the true fallout from this decision. The ultimate determining factor will be how many users begrudgingly switch over to the...
I don't think we can really say, yet, because we haven't actually seen the true fallout from this decision.
The ultimate determining factor will be how many users begrudgingly switch over to the official reddit app after June 30th and—of those who don't—how many of its biggest contributors it actually loses.
We honestly probably won't really know for at least six months—probably longer—whether there is a big enough decline in quality contributors to lead to a decline in other community engagement.
yeah that's the sucky thing as some one who is impatient. In the end only time will really tell. Hell. I fully plan/want to leave reddit soon as I can't use apollo but I fully admit I'm addicted...
yeah that's the sucky thing as some one who is impatient. In the end only time will really tell. Hell. I fully plan/want to leave reddit soon as I can't use apollo but I fully admit I'm addicted to reddit so we'll see (I already caved during the 2 day blackout to peruse and comment on the starfield subreddit).
I am with Christian (The apollo dev on this), I don't see reddit changing but part of me just refuses to give up that small bit of hope (that has gotten to almost nothing now seeing how many subreddits have caved and even when asking people just getting mad they took the subreddit down).
Deleting the bookmark and all apps helped me kick the Reddit habit. Just that friction of having to type in "reddit.com" every time I wanted to go there was good at slowing me down. Bonus if you...
Deleting the bookmark and all apps helped me kick the Reddit habit. Just that friction of having to type in "reddit.com" every time I wanted to go there was good at slowing me down. Bonus if you can stop URL autocompletion in your browsers.
This is pretty much it. Wait until July 1st when the 3rd party mod tools are blocked and the automod scripts that did a lot of the heavy work no longer function. That's when everything will go...
This is pretty much it. Wait until July 1st when the 3rd party mod tools are blocked and the automod scripts that did a lot of the heavy work no longer function. That's when everything will go downhill, and fast. They don't have anywhere near enough time to replace the mods, or enough employees to fill the role. The top 20 subs will be resurrected, everything else will devolve into a spam filled shitshow if they are foolish enough to force everything to reopen.
It's a little too early to make calls about right or wrong in the long-term sense of things, but I don't think that was 100% the perspective this article as framed around. No one expected that the...
It's a little too early to make calls about right or wrong in the long-term sense of things, but I don't think that was 100% the perspective this article as framed around.
No one expected that the blackout would kill reddit, or be so catastrophic and permanent that the site never recovers - that wasn't the goal. I don't think any but the wild crazies expected that we'd all black out and force Reddit to capitulate on the spot, completely and totally. That the effort might put pressure and attention on the issue and contribute to a change in stance was I think the most ambitious, realistic, goal.
I wouldn't say that "a two-day blackout" ending after two days means the strike somehow failed. Many communities are engaged in ongoing dialogues regarding next steps and what the community supports or wants from the long-term plan.
The repercussions of the changes to API are going to take months or years to become clear, because the majority of impact is not the protests themselves but the hypothetical consequences that the protests were opposed to. It could well be that everyone got mad, nothing happens, and there's no negative impact on the site due to the changes. It also could be that the ways that the site change provide just enough added barrier that site usage enters a decline over time.
I don't think there's going to be any massive, sweeping, changes that will totally decisively shift things - but I think that there's going to be lots of very small changes that may add up to something significant all the same. I'm not saying that optimistically, like I'm hoping Reddit gets hurt, but just that without third-party apps, I personally will see reddit far less on mobile. That's a decrease in traffic, and a decrease in my participation - and my participation contributes to making other folks' participation something positive and valuable, to keep them coming back. No delusion, I don't suffer from some feat of ego where my witty commentary singlehanded keeps people on the site, but that the site's main source of relevance is the conversations and the community - there's only so much of community you can lose before it stops being self-sustaining.
Part of the problem with their own app is how actively it attempts to keep people away from that part of the site and drive them back to feed scrolling - where the ads are - which will double down on stunting the community. People who relied on apps to access the site may drop off instead of changing, and the userbase still accessing via mobile will be architecturally driven away from the community as well. Worse, I think that the people who are most likely to leave are predominately from the demographics that are most important to the site - the highly-engaged and participating people, the folks who are posting the comments and the stories that all the other people show up to scroll through and consume as content.
I think that if we constrain the assessment to a goal of inflating metrics towards an IPO, Reddit has probably made the correct decision. However, coverage that's pointing out that the decisions there are trading the long-term health of the site for short-term gains are somewhat sabotaging the effort - investors may not 'fall for' high app-use numbers in light of how those numbers were obtained.
so if burnout becomes faster or subs get slightly worse moderation it'll have a minimal big picture impact.
Both of these are indeed relatively minor on their own, but the site isn't starting from zero and they are adding to the total. Burnout is already an issue for user retention, moderation is already a huge issue for user retention ... making those factors worse is going to be net-negative for the long-term health of the site. Even if their impact is invisible next month or next year, they're eating into an already-slim margin of error that Reddit may need to use more of later.
Who wants the entire userbase? With the exception of small or niche subs, reddit has become full of mindless crap and users who enjoy consuming pointless content. Or, they live to troll. I'm not...
Who wants the entire userbase? With the exception of small or niche subs, reddit has become full of mindless crap and users who enjoy consuming pointless content. Or, they live to troll.
I'm not hesitant to comment or post here or on federated sites. I quit making content for reddit years ago, and I rarely comment. It was not worth the headache. Social media is supposed to be fun! I don't want the people that sap the joy from sharing to leave reddit.
I understand. I think the main difference between the migration from Digg to reddit and a slow rexxit is that the platform that is available (mostly federated instances) is new tech to the...
I understand. I think the main difference between the migration from Digg to reddit and a slow rexxit is that the platform that is available (mostly federated instances) is new tech to the majority of users. The landslide has started and there is no way to stop the momentum. I agree that reddit won't miss a few thousand users. But, people have somewhere else to go to this time. A few thousand here and there starts changing the quality of the site. People get bored or tired and move on. Or, maybe not?
Yeah, and next to the trolls, every time I commented on Reddit I had the feeling in the back of my head that someone was going to attack me for what I said. I had some really bad interactions...
Yeah, and next to the trolls, every time I commented on Reddit I had the feeling in the back of my head that someone was going to attack me for what I said. I had some really bad interactions there (especially as a mod), and as you say it just wasn't fun to participate anymore.
I feel the same way and I left for good as soon as I saw an opportunity to do so. I really hope the people that foster said hostility don't follow.
I don't think we'll see the exodus that happened with Digg, it's going to be a slower trickle from the site as people find new options, and many will stay. We'll see if enough content posters or...
I don't think we'll see the exodus that happened with Digg, it's going to be a slower trickle from the site as people find new options, and many will stay. We'll see if enough content posters or mods leave to make the site unsustainable. It's just going to ooze people out like a sponge, but whether or not they'll still maintain enough people coming in to support that is what we'll have to wait and see.
Yeah I think they'll still be around for at least a couple of years. Content quality will go down when mod tools disappear, so it depends if reddit is able to fix that gap fast enough before the...
Yeah I think they'll still be around for at least a couple of years. Content quality will go down when mod tools disappear, so it depends if reddit is able to fix that gap fast enough before the content quality drops below a level that people want to keep coming back for. Who knows what will happen in the end.
Tragically it has become jokes in the comments section. 10 years ago an insightful comment was maybe 3 parents down, 5 years ago it was 9 or 10 parent comments down, recently it is just hard to...
Tragically it has become jokes in the comments section. 10 years ago an insightful comment was maybe 3 parents down, 5 years ago it was 9 or 10 parent comments down, recently it is just hard to find an insightful comment at all. Either jokes or personal stories. Just a bummer of an endless summer child.
I feel like it just depends which lens you view it through... the decisions themselves are business decisions that make sense, and I agree that they aren't "wrong", given that the goal is to...
I feel like it just depends which lens you view it through... the decisions themselves are business decisions that make sense, and I agree that they aren't "wrong", given that the goal is to increase revenue. Their plan makes sense. From a human perspective, spez being a dick is arguably kind of wrong bc he outwardly doesn't care about the consequences to devs or long time users, but probably doesn't matter considering their history with CEOs. Maybe wrong, but also unimportant noise. Ethically, I see merit to the arguments that what they are doing is wrong. It does not align with free and open internet, and it is a big "fuck you" to millions of loyal users. Feels exploitative of all the free labor that went into making the site capable of doing what it does, and dismissive of the impact to developers to give them only 30 days to prepare to pay up or shut down. So... I agree with you, but also think they can be technically not wrong, and still be wrong in other ways. If their goal was to keep devs and contributors around, then they'd be mega wrong. Goal to farm ad consumption and cut off those not being farmed, not wrong.
If they had worked on improving moderation tools and making the website ADA compliant before giving a very short-notice deadline to shut down 3rd party APIs I would be much more understanding. I...
If they had worked on improving moderation tools and making the website ADA compliant before giving a very short-notice deadline to shut down 3rd party APIs I would be much more understanding. I probably would have begrudgingly moved over to their crappy app. After all, they are a business and they can do what they want for the most part.
However, their website has been around too long to still not be ADA compliant, what were they waiting for? In addition, they rely on free labour for moderation when other websites spend millions, but they still can't be bothered to improve mod tools before making a drastic shift? They should have communicated with these communities (folks with disabilities and mods) and addressed their concerns long before shutting down 3rd party APIs.
The way they went about all of this was really poorly planned. I'm not even a mod but I'm leaving on principle.
Yeah, same. I am over it. Grief stage: acceptance. That memo being like "we have to nail this" etc made me feel really sad for the employees. I bet they are getting crunched so hard right now to...
Yeah, same. I am over it. Grief stage: acceptance. That memo being like "we have to nail this" etc made me feel really sad for the employees. I bet they are getting crunched so hard right now to deliver things that they should have had years to work on.
Good article! The EFF is great and if anyone has any spare money lying around, it's never a bad time to send some love to the EFF. They are the fighting the good fight, with wisdom and spirit!...
Good article! The EFF is great and if anyone has any spare money lying around, it's never a bad time to send some love to the EFF. They are the fighting the good fight, with wisdom and spirit!
From the article:
Moving to the Fediverse
This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge. A social network built on an open protocol can afford some host-agnosticism, and allow communities to persist even if individual hosts fail or start to abuse their power.
Mmmmmmmaybe, or maybe not. I am most active in /r/loseit, a weight-loss subreddit which is both a community of weight-losers but also a magnet for all kinds of user (teens, those fighting eating disorders, and the desperate or misled doing unhealthy/unsustainable things convinced that they're the right things) and spam problems by those who would exploit them.
I don't think we can build a similar community without specific rules and the controls necessary to enforce them, and say to no to the spammers and marketers.
Nothing I've seen during the Reddit showdown/shutdown leads me to hope to build one -- at least not yet (and I'm still new myself so I'm very possibly something). Reddit itself struggles as a platform for this, but these decentralized systems or general-purpose boards are even less apt to ever become a similarly suitable community of healthy-and-sustainable weight losers and maintainers that is moderated with the appropriate level of touch to keep it that way.
Hadn’t even realized I posted in that deleted thread and had meant to post generally. If it breaks the rules to post the comment again feel free to delete again. I’ll add a bit more to make it...
Hadn’t even realized I posted in that deleted thread and had meant to post generally. If it breaks the rules to post the comment again feel free to delete again. I’ll add a bit more to make it more substantive.
What Reddit got wrong was instead of facing the struggle of moderation and trying to find the actual scaleable solution, they kicked the can down the road. Now that can is a giant boulder, and I honestly don’t see how Reddit survives long-term. They are struggling to be profitable with a massive volunteer workforce and then expect to IPO and tell investors what? Trust us?
Every major tech player in the social space spends 100s of millions (if not billions) of dollars, collectively, on content moderation. Seems like a massive gamble to just hope that this volunteering group of users is always there to pick up the slack. If the well dries up even for a few months, what’s the back up plan? Reddit doesn’t have the capital to fill a major gap out of no where.
Oh, I wouldn't bet on that, EFF. It will scale just fine if you actually scale up the number of mods along with the users. Not like one mod per five hundred thousand, like reddit - we're talking...
Content moderation doesn’t work at scale.
Oh, I wouldn't bet on that, EFF. It will scale just fine if you actually scale up the number of mods along with the users. Not like one mod per five hundred thousand, like reddit - we're talking like one mod for every two users here. It's tricky building tools and safeguarding abuse, but it's doable, as long as you take it slow, do incremental improvements, and include community feedback in the dev process.
If that's not good enough, an LLM will be able to do it someday for sure, because it doesn't get tired, or burned out, and it can scale as high as it needs to scale. It'll probably take more resources to run that LLM than the site itself, but I'm sure that LLMs herald the doom of this particular problem. I'm also sure that eternal september will find some other way to make trouble, because entropy is physics and it's just baked in to this universe. You can't hide from it on a forum, much as we might like to.
A lot of people are probably tired of the Reddit related posts. But I found this article from the EFF, and it does give a fairly balanced overview of the entire issue and where things stood yesterday.
I do like being a mod, and hate it. With a good automod dev to stop the worst of it it was manageable. If/when tildes gets big they will have to do that same. No way an admin team can mod all of it. Also a good way to hopefully keep the company from fucking up if users can tell the company no to what they are doing.
I don't know if he already has, but I would imagine it exists in some capacity already. After all Deimos is the creator of what is now Reddit's Automoderator.
I posted a bit of info about it the other day. Like many other things, it's not fleshed out at this point (and doesn't need to be yet), but the foundation is there and it would be far more capable than AutoMod.
It lets you write full-on scripts in Lua for processing posts, which is more complex than configuring AutoMod in some ways, but a lot of the AutoMod stuff ended up being more complex than actual programming anyway.
(@FeminalPanda)
as a Lua lover (both the language and the natural satellite) i absolutely adore the idea of having access to Lua scripting in automod… the way reddit's automod works feels so janky.
Ooo lua, I have seen lua code but not messed with it for work. Maybe something I should dig into. I did read your post about separate groups. hopefully when that comes around could you give some time for subreddits to grab names before general users?
That's so cool! Did not know that.
I don't even really like being a mod, I just care about the communities I've taken 'responsibility' for and either don't trust someone else to do it, or think that my help is needed.
Being everyone's Bad Guy fucking blows and there's no way to moderate without being the bad guy because ultimately the majority of the role is one of either taking people's posts/comments down, or telling them off for breaking the rules. No one likes having their post taken down, no one likes being told off - even when it's deserved.
As far as "trust" I think it's worth clarifying;
One community I mod(ded) on Reddit is very prone to commercial attempts at manipulation, and for a very diffuse industry with a lot of little ties and connections - we've already had issues with people seeking modship so they can favour a company they're connected to, and we've definitely had issues where companies offer money to receive priority treatment.
Another is a subject that has a lot of contention around it and some politics strongly adjacent - the folks most motivated to mod are also prone to wanting to shift tone & content towards the politics side of things and away from the topic at the core, while the community as a whole has asked repeatedly that the community not become a political circlejerk.
I guess that's what I like too, being responsible for the community. I know a lot of hate gets thrown to mods but you can see the difference between no mod and mod is stark.
As someone that went to reddit after the digg 4.0 crash, I've always wondered how much money is infused in popular subreddits. On the other side of things, the news reddit, doesn't have a lot of news, which is weird. Maybe a couple dozen articles a day, which seems like there is a lot more news in a day. Worldnews is the same.
I know that there's a ton of opportunity, if you're in a community that faces the correct subject matter.
We're not big enough that we get very many offers, but I can also readily see that I could make a decent side-profit by soliciting conflicts of interest. I know that we'd probably get more direct offers if it was more public that our time and attention were available to purchase.
Which I think cuts two ways - if I and all the other people I work with have all managed to resist the temptations, it's fair to say that other people outside my sphere probably do the same. At the same time, knowing what's been offered my way, I can absolutely see the flip side of that coin - where the temptation is present, has a number on it, and everyone does ultimately have their price. I can acknowledge that deep down, if someone offered me a big enough number, I'd absolutely trade my integrity on the internet for life-changing real-world money. After the cheque cleared.
I feel like some of what's hit them is that community members like to demand that this or that thing be banned, and over time too much accession to those demands can result in banning the bulk of possible content. The pace of content there has been on slow decline over the years and as a result of years and years of small tightenings to content - banning blog farms, banning content-farm 'news' sites, banning 'misinformation' news, banning duplicate coverage ... etc. Each change being wholly reasonable in isolation, but also net turning off the majority of possible submissions.
I also mod a smaller, academic, community and there's very low content there day-to-day and I already have a decent list of what I'm supposed to remove, and we also have meta discussions from time to time where the community really wants "more content" and also for me to remove most of what remains. In their case, no one submits the stuff they want to see, but they want one of the two types of discussion post still allowed to be removed in addition to all the other stuff - as if having next to no content will make other people post the stuff they want to see.
What happens IMO is that as content locks down, what remains can get more and more repetitive, until people ask to have that boring content removed as well. IE: once you've banned news from blog rings and content farms, then the multiple news sites' stories all about the same big story from that day get more and more annoying - because there's no other content to pad out the feed.
Thanks for the write up. Makes sense. But when I hit /news I just want to read the old school paper when I wake up with my tea. But nope. It has to be curated and drama filled. Bummer.
I appreciate this article. It's really good to see articles like this on respected sites such as EFF. It also gives more exposure to decentralized platforms. I'm on a few federated services, and the excitement there is refreshing.
Check out programming.dev if you are interested.
this is a fantastic summary and very well organized and written. as the article is written by the eff, and links to background knowledge link to eff's analysis of previous websplosions like fark, and digg, it's solid information and very digestible.
this would be a great article to pass to the untechnical folks in your life.
i know, just like creesch says ”people are probably getting tired of the reddit related posts”, and i agree. i am, however, still getting messages frequently from various contacts pretty much asking the same thing:
”what's going on with reddit? when will it go back to normal?”
”why is reddit suddenly sucking and i can't find vr-tech answers anymore?”
and
at least i have a good way to answer the first question: with a link to op's eff article. unfortunately i have to answer the training query: reddit very likely won't be returning to normal.
as for the rest, maybe it's time for me to graduate from long-form rambling reddit posts on technology and move on to writing actual articles and try to publish them somewhere. perhaps self-publishing via medium.com or youtube... but i'd much rather share the very limited revenue (if any) if someone else was working on promotion, like at an existing publication: self promotion is not my strong suit.
Have you considered hashnode.com or one of the federated blog services?
not yet, thank you!
i've downloaded all my posts from the reddit ”download all your data” options and received a zip of a bunch of .csv files. the zip was like 25-35mb of text :)
my next step is to toss it in a postgres db and quickly build a tool to spyder the threads for context and fill out to postgres db.
^^^: that's the time critical bit, so i'll do that this weekend and just hammer on it until it's done. after that i can look at hashnode.com and a federated blod service or something. i'll be picking your brain (if you don't mind) as while i get the underlying ideas, i haven't touched the federated net yet... yet /me:rubs-hands.gif /me:witchcackle.ogg
you can stop reading here as the rest is me venting and writing my nightly journal². right now in my live everything is complicated and bad bloody occuring simultaneously: i thought time was supposed to keep everything from happening all at once, but apparently time, she is derelict in her duties.
time is normally slippery for me: i'm a touch autistic, older, single, no kids, and happy because i can dedicate as much time as i want to my zillion or so hobbies. i've been bad at time my whole life: seconds, minutes, hours even... maaayybee today, tomorrow, and yesterday i can deal with. outside of that it's an abstraction. i'm in my late 40's and yesterday i was 12, the day before that 25.
i have a great memory that remembers things vividly, but all as separate episodes i have to figure out when happened by figuring out what happened before and what happened after. yes, spooling through my memory is much like walking a linked list.
don't laugh¹, but to figure out what year something happened, i listen to the music in the memory (when available) and work out years based on song release dates. srsly.
anywho, right now:
reddit is dying
i'm signing the papers on the sale of my house⁴ of 23 years because i have 13¢ in my bank account because Events⁵ and if i don't, the servicing company auctions the house without having to give me anything⁶
my best friend is about to give birth for the first time
i have had one or both feet/tendons/ligaments screwed up to the point movement has been troubles almost every week since christmas.
aaand that's why.
but i'll get my data and its context off of reddit then nuke it, rest assured. it's a moral imperative.
footnotes
1: ok, well laugh yer arse off because it is bloody ridiculous, lols :)
2: i write my nightly journal entry whenever it's time to write and wherever i happen to be written if i'm already writing something. when it happens it's usually reddit, ⁸oftimes* telegram, and every now-and-then twitter. congratulations! it's your lucky night, dear reader, as this is tilde's inceptive krista-ramble³!
3: i bet i used inceptive incorrect. there's probably a number of spelling errors and wordsbglommed together like that as i'm using my tablet and tildes.net doesn't have my usual editing/proofing tools working with it yet. my 'pologies :(
4: more like bedroom/studio/theater/lab/workshop/development studio. it has a firepole from the loft to the multipurpose studio/theater room.
--=
5: i had a 2008 porsche cayman s i purchased in '13 and paid off in '18, one month before an suv blowing a red light at 65mph+ broadsided me sending me to the trauma center code yellow. to shorten a story i've told too many times: broken toes, knee, ankles, thumbs. lots of ribs flexing too much and cartilage damage. contused colon, intestines, spleen, liver, kidneys (one ruptured a bit), partially deflated right lung, lots of soft tissue damage (some spots are still numb), bloodshot eyes.
bad enough the paramedics didn't bother checking my car for quite some time. i can't blame them as it was splatter damage, and i wouldn't want to see part of a corpse either. i was crammed half under the remaining dash.
stopover in the trauma wards, lots of imaging. eventually got home and spent a few weeks pissing/crapping blood, ~6 months bedridden,~16 months pt/healing. still have oddities, including a full head of white hair i watched grow almost as a perfect line in my hair.
that day i decided to put down my vr research pre-startup (1.5 years) because i was running out of savings and went to get a taco bean burrito on the corner as condolences... plus i was starving. i never got that bean burrito. therefore car insurance, but no real medical.
after the lawyers, the tweenage kid was at fault. all of his insurance + my underinsured rider + value of my porsche wasn't enough to cover my medical bills + all my regular bills for 2 years, so i spent the rest of my savings, plus credit cards.
this dumped me into the middle of the plague without a job, a nearly 4 year gap (working on my pre-startup + healing + not finding work) making employment impossible to find for this 20+ year c/c++/asm/c#/basic ee+firmware and nearly everything else besides web pages girl.
i'm shitty at resumes and finding working + i prefer socializing in person + linkedin + kept previous job 13 years == krista is fucked and files bankruptcy a day before they were to auction my house.
i got an hourly job at my previous employer (small company, long story not for this evening, bad idea), had it until the new project i was on had everyone else quit or fired because it was fucked, asked to crunch and did so between dec26-jan26, got formal write up for working more than 40hr/wk. got fire in march, co-president (another long story for later).
cant find job, bankruptcy lawyer forgets to tell me that this breaks my bankruptcy agreement, and house goes for auction on may-19. i found out may-18.
call lawyer, give him my last $kilobuck, he is supposed to hold auction off untill find employment.
can't: despite tech experience, 'm bat at self promotion. was going to hire resume doctor, but lawyer took my last $kilobuck... and couldn't/wouldn't push auction beyond june 20th. he told me may 30th.
--=
6: after creative fees
7: i've a pretty nice gas infrared grill if anyone wants it, plus other tech stuff and maybe appliances. message me.
Popping in to say howdy Creesch. Btw you were right the whole time about slack and discord, we all should have stayed on IRC
Lol, I moved to discord years ago at this point. Still don't like slack very much though. Discord I sort of got used to and serves it purpose for live communication. Don't very much like their push to appear more like a forum though as discord is about as closed as it gets.
Have been here for a while :) Mostly lurking though.
I question the premise that Reddit got anything wrong.
The strike is pretty much over, a handful of subs are striking forever but they'll be quickly replaced and the majority are coming back. Maybe Reddit expected less backlash, but the amount they got was fairly minimal and isn't going to have a real impact.
Similarly, looking at activity nothing has happened. Even during blackout people just used the remaining subreddits. The amount of users leaving has, at least temporarily, boosted this place and Fediverse, but it's not a remotely significant amount of the overall Reddit user base. The increase in ad revenue from more people using the official app will more than offset this loss.
Potentially in the future you could see moderator burnout become an issue, but there's always going to be more people willing to step up as a mod, so if burnout becomes faster or subs get slightly worse moderation it'll have a minimal big picture impact.
Tl;dr, I don't think Reddit actually got anything wrong, and if they could have seen the future they'd probably do the same thing over again
This is objectively untrue. Tons of subreddits are still private including 4 of the largest 7 by subscriber count, and many others have restricted permissions.
Where are you getting this from? I subscribe to around 900 subreddits and yesterday my front page was a ghost town. It's a little bit more populated today but still nothing like it was prior to the blackout.
There's places you can track overall sitewide activity on Reddit, it was down a bit but not much.
I have no clue which subreddits you subscribe to so maybe your personal front page was a ghost town, but that was not the experience for 99% of users.
I don't think we can really say, yet, because we haven't actually seen the true fallout from this decision.
The ultimate determining factor will be how many users begrudgingly switch over to the official reddit app after June 30th and—of those who don't—how many of its biggest contributors it actually loses.
We honestly probably won't really know for at least six months—probably longer—whether there is a big enough decline in quality contributors to lead to a decline in other community engagement.
yeah that's the sucky thing as some one who is impatient. In the end only time will really tell. Hell. I fully plan/want to leave reddit soon as I can't use apollo but I fully admit I'm addicted to reddit so we'll see (I already caved during the 2 day blackout to peruse and comment on the starfield subreddit).
I am with Christian (The apollo dev on this), I don't see reddit changing but part of me just refuses to give up that small bit of hope (that has gotten to almost nothing now seeing how many subreddits have caved and even when asking people just getting mad they took the subreddit down).
Deleting the bookmark and all apps helped me kick the Reddit habit. Just that friction of having to type in "reddit.com" every time I wanted to go there was good at slowing me down. Bonus if you can stop URL autocompletion in your browsers.
It really helps that Reddit's mobile UI is trash.
This is pretty much it. Wait until July 1st when the 3rd party mod tools are blocked and the automod scripts that did a lot of the heavy work no longer function. That's when everything will go downhill, and fast. They don't have anywhere near enough time to replace the mods, or enough employees to fill the role. The top 20 subs will be resurrected, everything else will devolve into a spam filled shitshow if they are foolish enough to force everything to reopen.
It's a little too early to make calls about right or wrong in the long-term sense of things, but I don't think that was 100% the perspective this article as framed around.
No one expected that the blackout would kill reddit, or be so catastrophic and permanent that the site never recovers - that wasn't the goal. I don't think any but the wild crazies expected that we'd all black out and force Reddit to capitulate on the spot, completely and totally. That the effort might put pressure and attention on the issue and contribute to a change in stance was I think the most ambitious, realistic, goal.
I wouldn't say that "a two-day blackout" ending after two days means the strike somehow failed. Many communities are engaged in ongoing dialogues regarding next steps and what the community supports or wants from the long-term plan.
The repercussions of the changes to API are going to take months or years to become clear, because the majority of impact is not the protests themselves but the hypothetical consequences that the protests were opposed to. It could well be that everyone got mad, nothing happens, and there's no negative impact on the site due to the changes. It also could be that the ways that the site change provide just enough added barrier that site usage enters a decline over time.
I don't think there's going to be any massive, sweeping, changes that will totally decisively shift things - but I think that there's going to be lots of very small changes that may add up to something significant all the same. I'm not saying that optimistically, like I'm hoping Reddit gets hurt, but just that without third-party apps, I personally will see reddit far less on mobile. That's a decrease in traffic, and a decrease in my participation - and my participation contributes to making other folks' participation something positive and valuable, to keep them coming back. No delusion, I don't suffer from some feat of ego where my witty commentary singlehanded keeps people on the site, but that the site's main source of relevance is the conversations and the community - there's only so much of community you can lose before it stops being self-sustaining.
Part of the problem with their own app is how actively it attempts to keep people away from that part of the site and drive them back to feed scrolling - where the ads are - which will double down on stunting the community. People who relied on apps to access the site may drop off instead of changing, and the userbase still accessing via mobile will be architecturally driven away from the community as well. Worse, I think that the people who are most likely to leave are predominately from the demographics that are most important to the site - the highly-engaged and participating people, the folks who are posting the comments and the stories that all the other people show up to scroll through and consume as content.
I think that if we constrain the assessment to a goal of inflating metrics towards an IPO, Reddit has probably made the correct decision. However, coverage that's pointing out that the decisions there are trading the long-term health of the site for short-term gains are somewhat sabotaging the effort - investors may not 'fall for' high app-use numbers in light of how those numbers were obtained.
Both of these are indeed relatively minor on their own, but the site isn't starting from zero and they are adding to the total. Burnout is already an issue for user retention, moderation is already a huge issue for user retention ... making those factors worse is going to be net-negative for the long-term health of the site. Even if their impact is invisible next month or next year, they're eating into an already-slim margin of error that Reddit may need to use more of later.
Who wants the entire userbase? With the exception of small or niche subs, reddit has become full of mindless crap and users who enjoy consuming pointless content. Or, they live to troll.
I'm not hesitant to comment or post here or on federated sites. I quit making content for reddit years ago, and I rarely comment. It was not worth the headache. Social media is supposed to be fun! I don't want the people that sap the joy from sharing to leave reddit.
My point has nothing to do with the quality of this site, just that Reddit won't miss a few thousand people who leave
I understand. I think the main difference between the migration from Digg to reddit and a slow rexxit is that the platform that is available (mostly federated instances) is new tech to the majority of users. The landslide has started and there is no way to stop the momentum. I agree that reddit won't miss a few thousand users. But, people have somewhere else to go to this time. A few thousand here and there starts changing the quality of the site. People get bored or tired and move on. Or, maybe not?
Yeah, and next to the trolls, every time I commented on Reddit I had the feeling in the back of my head that someone was going to attack me for what I said. I had some really bad interactions there (especially as a mod), and as you say it just wasn't fun to participate anymore.
I feel the same way and I left for good as soon as I saw an opportunity to do so. I really hope the people that foster said hostility don't follow.
I didn't realize how bad it was until I landed here. Everyone is so awesome, and I can't stop talking to people!
I don't think we'll see the exodus that happened with Digg, it's going to be a slower trickle from the site as people find new options, and many will stay. We'll see if enough content posters or mods leave to make the site unsustainable. It's just going to ooze people out like a sponge, but whether or not they'll still maintain enough people coming in to support that is what we'll have to wait and see.
Yeah I think they'll still be around for at least a couple of years. Content quality will go down when mod tools disappear, so it depends if reddit is able to fix that gap fast enough before the content quality drops below a level that people want to keep coming back for. Who knows what will happen in the end.
Tragically it has become jokes in the comments section. 10 years ago an insightful comment was maybe 3 parents down, 5 years ago it was 9 or 10 parent comments down, recently it is just hard to find an insightful comment at all. Either jokes or personal stories. Just a bummer of an endless summer child.
I feel like it just depends which lens you view it through... the decisions themselves are business decisions that make sense, and I agree that they aren't "wrong", given that the goal is to increase revenue. Their plan makes sense. From a human perspective, spez being a dick is arguably kind of wrong bc he outwardly doesn't care about the consequences to devs or long time users, but probably doesn't matter considering their history with CEOs. Maybe wrong, but also unimportant noise. Ethically, I see merit to the arguments that what they are doing is wrong. It does not align with free and open internet, and it is a big "fuck you" to millions of loyal users. Feels exploitative of all the free labor that went into making the site capable of doing what it does, and dismissive of the impact to developers to give them only 30 days to prepare to pay up or shut down. So... I agree with you, but also think they can be technically not wrong, and still be wrong in other ways. If their goal was to keep devs and contributors around, then they'd be mega wrong. Goal to farm ad consumption and cut off those not being farmed, not wrong.
If they had worked on improving moderation tools and making the website ADA compliant before giving a very short-notice deadline to shut down 3rd party APIs I would be much more understanding. I probably would have begrudgingly moved over to their crappy app. After all, they are a business and they can do what they want for the most part.
However, their website has been around too long to still not be ADA compliant, what were they waiting for? In addition, they rely on free labour for moderation when other websites spend millions, but they still can't be bothered to improve mod tools before making a drastic shift? They should have communicated with these communities (folks with disabilities and mods) and addressed their concerns long before shutting down 3rd party APIs.
The way they went about all of this was really poorly planned. I'm not even a mod but I'm leaving on principle.
Yeah, same. I am over it. Grief stage: acceptance. That memo being like "we have to nail this" etc made me feel really sad for the employees. I bet they are getting crunched so hard right now to deliver things that they should have had years to work on.
The removed thread below here was one user bickering unproductively back and forth with a few other people.
Good article! The EFF is great and if anyone has any spare money lying around, it's never a bad time to send some love to the EFF. They are the fighting the good fight, with wisdom and spirit!
From the article:
Mmmmmmmaybe, or maybe not. I am most active in /r/loseit, a weight-loss subreddit which is both a community of weight-losers but also a magnet for all kinds of user (teens, those fighting eating disorders, and the desperate or misled doing unhealthy/unsustainable things convinced that they're the right things) and spam problems by those who would exploit them.
I don't think we can build a similar community without specific rules and the controls necessary to enforce them, and say to no to the spammers and marketers.
Nothing I've seen during the Reddit showdown/shutdown leads me to hope to build one -- at least not yet (and I'm still new myself so I'm very possibly something). Reddit itself struggles as a platform for this, but these decentralized systems or general-purpose boards are even less apt to ever become a similarly suitable community of healthy-and-sustainable weight losers and maintainers that is moderated with the appropriate level of touch to keep it that way.
Hadn’t even realized I posted in that deleted thread and had meant to post generally. If it breaks the rules to post the comment again feel free to delete again. I’ll add a bit more to make it more substantive.
What Reddit got wrong was instead of facing the struggle of moderation and trying to find the actual scaleable solution, they kicked the can down the road. Now that can is a giant boulder, and I honestly don’t see how Reddit survives long-term. They are struggling to be profitable with a massive volunteer workforce and then expect to IPO and tell investors what? Trust us?
Every major tech player in the social space spends 100s of millions (if not billions) of dollars, collectively, on content moderation. Seems like a massive gamble to just hope that this volunteering group of users is always there to pick up the slack. If the well dries up even for a few months, what’s the back up plan? Reddit doesn’t have the capital to fill a major gap out of no where.
Oh, I wouldn't bet on that, EFF. It will scale just fine if you actually scale up the number of mods along with the users. Not like one mod per five hundred thousand, like reddit - we're talking like one mod for every two users here. It's tricky building tools and safeguarding abuse, but it's doable, as long as you take it slow, do incremental improvements, and include community feedback in the dev process.
If that's not good enough, an LLM will be able to do it someday for sure, because it doesn't get tired, or burned out, and it can scale as high as it needs to scale. It'll probably take more resources to run that LLM than the site itself, but I'm sure that LLMs herald the doom of this particular problem. I'm also sure that eternal september will find some other way to make trouble, because entropy is physics and it's just baked in to this universe. You can't hide from it on a forum, much as we might like to.