Reddit admins are now approaching mod teams of closed subreddits, looking for moderators who will cooperate and re-open them
I just saw this post in the /r/ModCoord subreddit, which lists multiple instances of Reddit admins contacting moderator teams of closed subreddits with this message:
Hi everyone,
We are aware that you have chosen to close your community at this time. We are reaching out to find out if any moderators currently on the mod team would be willing to take steps to reopen the community. Subreddits exist for the benefit of the community of users who come to them for support and belonging and in the end, moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust. Your users rely on your community for information, support, entertainment, and finding connection with others who have similar interests. The ability to find and make these connections is incredibly important to many people and ensuring that active communities are able to remain stable and active (and open) is very important.
Our goal here is to work with the existing mod team to find a path forward and make sure your subreddit is usable for the community which makes its home here. If you are not able or willing to reopen and maintain the community please let us know.
Shit is getting real. The admins are looking for scabs who are willing to cross the picket-line and do the work the strikers are refusing to do.
It's not like this wasn't predictable. We all knew this was coming. It's still surprising to see it actually happen.
They approached is on Friday and I told them I'm too tired and need to sleep, which wasn't even a lie. When I woke up my permissions were taken, I let chat GPT write a post for me about forced labour and let the the subreddit set to restricted, so nobody can post.
I still get attacked by trolls for it until today.
My whiny post is all they see and some old content they can't even react to.
I silently got my permissions back in the morning and used it to delete my intellectual property from the subreddit. (header, custom snoo and so on)
I requested to get the modlist sorted and claimed we're going to reopen afterwards. We actually have mods that want to to do it, mods that were against the blackout from the beginning but did it because they stood behind me. I can't blame them. They're naive and think they won't get the rug pulled under them.
When they finally get to resorting the mod list I'm off of reddit and I will have way less stress, not getting called a Nazi by actual Neonazis day in day out.
Spez announce he's going to let communities vote to remove mods in the future. Those votes will definitely be fair and not get manipulated by bad faith actor's trying to seize the subreddits.
Huffmann is going full Elon Musk and replace moderators with toxic stooges.
Reddit is dead. I think reddit was dead the moment deimorz quit. I tried to quit back then too, but having created and maintained a subreddit for so long held me back.
I will finally not have to worry about all of this anymore in a couple of days and I think I will be fine with it.
When I look back on a couple months and see that my sub turned into a toxic hellhole full of disinformation, I will shed a tear or two but still live in a better state of mind.
It's over. Reddit is dead and will continue to die. The page will still be there, but it will never be the same.
I find it helpful to remember: on pretty much every other large scale social media platform, people get paid to do moderation. They probably are treated poorly, and paid far too little but the point remains -- reddit is subsisting on volunteer efforts which give it value.
But contrast that with "we've spent 5$ a month for the last X years to rent a VPS to run the custom bots we wrote" (shout out to r/music^), and you can immediately see how there's no way to replace a mod team.
FWIW, I stepped away from modding two defaults years ago and have never regretted it for a moment. I have, recently, discovered that I do regret stepping away from all my communities on reddit, but I have (this week) found some of them re-born on other websites because of this drama. The reddit giveth, the reddit taketh away.
-- Steve Huffman
It's always projection with people like Huffman and Musk.
Reddit having volunteers as moderators is providing them protection from DMCA liability via safe harbour. If they started paying mods, even cheap outsourced ones, then it becomes a whole other ballgame of lawsuits.
Right, I’ve been reading a couple of papers on the 2015 blackout today out of curiosity, and some explicitly call out this liability reduction, see the “Moderation Work” section
(And another paper, for kicks)
I understand the feeling. Regardless of whether or not the power users are the heart of a community on Reddit, I don't think I've ever seen such division within a site-wide protest until this past week. Redditors used to stand in unity to fight for a free and open internet. It was a community of free thinkers who were very conscious of looming corporate astroturfing. I think it's been a big wake-up call that Reddit hasn't been this way for over half a decade now.
The majority of Redditors do use new Reddit and the main Reddit app. The majority don't value long-form discussion-based content. The majority love using the voting system as an agree/disagree button. And the majority love how Reddit is today.
Having said that, Reddit will feel the loss of the majority of Reddit users who are most hurt/betrayed by how Reddit is treating them (especially the mods and the users that made Reddit a great discussion hub back in the day). Communities will suffer as the people who actually cared to clean up low-effort content and spam will leave. They'll suffer as the most insightful community members stop offering their opinions and food for thought.
What's left will be the majority that only cared about low-effort dopamine content and highly reactionary people without critical thinking skills. Like you said, Reddit was already circling the drain for years, but this really feels like the final nail in the coffin.
The thing that's really going to sting when the dust settles is, the majority of Redditors do not contribute anything. It's the minority who create all the value, both in moderation and in content, and it's the minority who are leaving.
That's a metric I would love to see - I know the breakdown of percentages for site visitors, but what's the breakdown by percentage for the 1% that contribute the most in terms of moderation and content, the 9% that contribute sometimes, and the 90% that lurk? I suspect the numbers for that vital 1% and 9% would skew heavily to the 3PA side.
5 years ago is when they banned the vice subs markets (tobacco/alcohol) then they forced us to stop discussing vendors/buying/selling...then they marked the sub NSFW. 5 years ago is when the community built its own forum and told reddit to fuck off. Glad to see it's finally happening with the rest of reddit.
What's the URL for these forums? I'm curious to see what they look like now, perhaps as a glimpse into the future of other communities.
We built this forum 5 years ago, speak-easy.club. We have 10k~ members now, and use Xenforo as the software, it works great on mobile which is why we chose it. We built it when reddit banned out markets without even telling us, lost years of data (pricing and verification of members being trustworthy or not). Which made everyone realize that nothing we do is safe if it's on someone else's software. So we all banded together and built our own home.
It's going to be really fun the first time a big subreddit run by bad actors forcibly overtakes a smaller subreddit by forcing a mod vote and replacing the moderators with their own members. Spez is either a naive idiot for thinking it won't happen, or he legitimately doesn't give a shit but the overall quality of Reddit is going to take a dive bomb either way.
He doesn't care, as he's just mad he sold for 10mil while the rest of his social media pals all sold for hundreds of millions or even billions. Dude will cash out the second reddit has it's IPO and then he'll just try and drain the corpse.
You can’t really cash out of an IPO that way though. Most of your money is tied up in the company’s valuation. He’d just be exposing his own fortune.
Sure but he can cash out after the lockout period, which if he keeps the place from collapsing before then, it's going to net him plenty.
I think he's going to use it as a boogeyman to scare mods. Mods that support him will become immune to the vote, and mods who is against him will be open to the vote, and the voting public will be reddit goons or bots.
Reddit died in 2015, corporate froze out anyone who worked there that might stand up for the communities rather than just exploit them. It's been a walking corpse since then, just waiting to see how many more shambling steps it can manage before it falls apart from the rot.
I did too. It took years and in all honestly there still aren't perfect replacements for a few comminities I frequented. But I'm using this opportunity to really seek and actively use alternatives.
r/interestingasfuck has hit on an... interesting... approach. As a kind of 'work to rule' the mods have reopened the sub, but removed all the rules apart from site-wide rules.
They will not be removing nsfw content, as this does not breach Reddit's site-wide policies. Apparently this impacts Reddit's advertising revenue as advertisers don't want association with nsfw subs.
I think a perhaps more interesting aspect to this is it forces Reddit's hand with regard to replacing mods.
Will they expedite the death of the site by replacing errant mods with Quislings? Probably.
I think this is interesting, and maybe the best approach. Reddit is trying to game the system so their advertisers don't pull out. NSFW content (for some reason) scares advertisers. They can still advertise on the site, but not in subs, I think that might be the key to all of the lost revenue for Reddit.
Malicious compliance through NSFW content (and low moderation)!
Oh you can make an entire novel explaining the reasons and histories behind all of that. There are tangentially related documentaries covering the topic of nudity and its impact on American media. But I digress.
I think this is my favorite approach yet. If only because it forces Reddit's hand one of the two big (and seemingly inevitable) changes reddit wants to move towards. Pulling a Tumblr the same year you anger your power users and free labor would be a sight to see.
The real strategy to this was not to blackout anything but instead innundate the site with random stuff. If they replace the mod team with internal people, those people will have to work tons of time to remove all the garbage. You can imagine what happens when r/pics starts getting no stop r/circleherk posts.
This is the way. Then those people who don't care start getting garbage instead of good stuff which leads them to leave until it's "all over"
They need to show plenty of scenes of people not pulling out... to try to get advertisers to pull out.
And as I predicted yesterday in a thread on another site, it was immediately overrun by OF spam. There was a wild notion that by letting upvotes/downvotes curate content, users would downvote things like porn in good faith. This of course, completely ignores the fact that 1) a lot of redditors will upvote tits because tits, and 2) bot manipulation is rampant.
A lot of the users on reddit who are angry at the protest, are living under the illusion that reddit itself fosters the content and that mods are just in the way. They don't see the essential role moderators can play on quality control and curration. Reddit on its own becomes a shithole pretty quickly
I have seen WAY too many posts from angry users complaining that "it's mods who are on a power trip". I was the head admin of an honest to goodness forum for over half a decade, so I know what it's like to grow and foster a community. It takes a lot of effort that the end user doesn't necessarily see, and you rarely get praise for it outside of your fellow staff. You don't do it for the recognition though, you do it because you love your community. So it breaks my heart and boils my blood to see people dismiss al of this as "power tripping mods". They have no idea what it actually takes to run anything like that, whether it's a subreddit, internet forum, or other similar community.
Yeah it's nuts. I have to assume reddit is their first online community. This is how its worked from the very beginning or anything online. Chat rooms, message boards, discord servers, game servers and so on, all work on the idea that the person who started it, sets and enforces rules, and if you don't like it, find somewhere else or start your own.
I remember when the reaction to mods doing something unpopular- either because actual power tripping or simply because it would make things easier in the long term rather than short- there would be tons of replies and upvotes for "MODS R GAYYYYYY!!!" or such.
It's that old IT joke: when your job is to fix any problems, the boss goes "Nothing's broken. Why are we paying you?" or "Everything's broken. Why are we paying you?'
Were you around for the Y2K crisis? All that concern about computers crashing because date fields had two characters for the year instead of four characters: hospitals were going to stop working on 1st January 2000, airplanes were going to fall out of the sky, traffic lights would break down... utter chaos. So, IT people all around the world buckled down, with lots of money being thrown at them by companies terrified that their business would collapse, and they fixed everything they could find.
On 1st January 2000, just about everything worked fine.
So, of course, some people wanted to know why we'd all spent so many hundreds of millions of dollars to fix something that was obviously not a real problem. <sigh>
I honestly need to stop going over the reddit and getting irritated by comments from those types of people. I am baffled by some of the threads I'm seeing over there. Just endless comments calling mods "fat basement nerds," "dumb as 8th graders," or "porn addicted freaks."
It's like reddit has been slowly taken over by Facebook users who have no idea how self-run internet communities work. Moderation on reddit is almost entirely thankless work, usually done out of appreciation for the communities that mods are a part of. At least based on the mods I've interacted with, that's much more often the case than some sort of power hungry toxicity.
How do these people expect reddit to function without good mods? It's insane.
they
The "power trip" thing is, frankly, bullshit. Modding a subreddit doesn't give anyone any power, it gives a shit load of responsibility if the sub's at all popular, but no power. There isn't a single mod on reddit who couldn't be replaced.
Hey! I take offence at that!
<then remembers he stepped down from modding a lot of subreddits in 2016, which all continued to run well for years afterward, until this latest kerfuffle>
But I built a couple of those subreddits, and they wouldn't even exist if I and a couple of other moderators hadn't taken the initiative. Hmph.
EDIT: Grammar.
calm down :D
doesn't mean that the replacement will be good, right? So all your hard work is still there, as evidenced by the subs still existing years after because the foundation is solid.
sure, in the same way no single [insert skilled labor here] can't be replaced.
I don't want to be around for the fallout if enough workers quit and new workers are still figuring out how to sail, though.
It'll be a bit rough for a few weeks as teams get up to speed, but it won't be the end of the world for reddit. 90% of their traffic is passive consumers who don't know or care about the mess going on right now.
I could even see the argument for this benefitting reddit if some of the more tightly controlled subs suddenly allow tons of posts that generate clicks, regardless of if it's on topic for the sub or not.
I wonder about that. I don't think it will get truly dire because I'm guessing admins will invisibly step in to help the larger mods (assuming that there aren't simply qualified mods to begin with). But the easiest thing to do with a passive user is put them off. If they see nothing because all the big subs are NSFW or if they only see a bunch of spam, they will just move to Instagram/TikTok/etc. That CAN have a big impact.
I don’t think it’s entirely bullshit. Mostly, sure. And I’m a mod!
But many folks (including me) have stories of a mod who crossed a line. Even if it is one out of a hundred mods you deal with across all the subs you are on, that incident sticks with you, and you start to tread more cautiously to avoid a ban. You tell other users. Newbies hear multiple stories of “power-tripping mods” and get the view that all of them are bad.
I liken it to the professor who hands out poor grades to anyone who disagrees: rare, but are you gonna risk flunking a class to them?
That’s very true, and I do think reddit needs a mechanism to deal with mods like that, but it’s going to be tricky to navigate. Especially if they follow through with the idea to let users vote out mods they don’t like. You only have to look at what’s happening in the world right now to know that it would immediately be weaponization against the 2SLGBT+ community. Given the recent actions on the site, I don’t have a lot of faith that reddit will protect that community.
But for the most part, the issues I’ve seen with “power tripping“ tends to be either a misunderstanding or exaggerated. Quite often it’ll be framed as “ I got banned for disagreeing with the mod” but when you actually look at what they said, it was something really hateful. I know for my part, I couldn’t care less if someone didn’t agree with me on, say, a favourite fighter. Really the only power that mods have is to ban individual users, and remove or approve comments or posts. Any of those decisions can be circumvented or overturned by another mod. With bans, it’s trivial to get around them. I know Reddit has made some improvements to their systems to detect that, but any user with any kind of technical knowledge can get around that in five minutes. I’m thinking here of a few specific users, I know that have cycled through literally hundreds and thousands of accounts because they’re hiding behind VPNs.
And when I think about power on a website like Reddit, I can’t help but think it’s a piddly thing that some let take over their life. At the end of the day, it’s just a website. Users will come and go, as will mods. Having power over something like that is ephemeral by its very nature.
The removal of default subs back in 2015 in response to the black out took away a lot of the impact of any kind of future action like that, and let other subs grow that weren’t controlled by the same group of users. And that isn’t a bad thing.
I’ve rambled a little bit here, sorry. Under the current circumstances, I’ve been thinking about this a lot.
Edit: one thing, I forgot to mention, is that there are areas where mods are completely powerless. I’m thinking here mainly of targeted harassment. If you’ve modded Reddit for a while, then I’m sure you’ve seen groups target either a mod or another user for harassment purposes. I’ve seen some pretty vicious groups organized to harass people off the site and ultimately all we can do is report it like any other user and hope the admins take action. There have been times when I felt so powerless and helpless to deal with things like that.
I think you have to remember that more often than not, when interacting on Reddit, you are doing so with teenagers
This is a common thing to say, but is there actually data to support it? I was able to find some demographic data here and they say:
There's no data for minors but if usage decreases with age within the 18-29 demo, wouldn't that imply the majority of reddit users are in their mid-late 20s?
Day[9] had a brief bit (in the context of DOTA) about how we tend to blame teenagers for toxicity on the internet but, actually, kids don't care enough to go on long rants about the DPS of Death Prophet's ultimate or whatever. Thats almost entirely your older office worker who gets a few hours a day of DOTA as his unwinding time and when you whiff on your gank attempt you've ruined his night.
This is true. Most kids I know will avoid writing like the plague. They're the ones creating the memes, for sure, but the long rants are a different demographic entirely.
That being said, maybe I shouldn't assume so much given that when I was a teenager I was prone to writing long rants (and this was handwritten, not online-- by the time I discovered forums I was past the "edgy teen phase" so I don't have a significant record of long internet rants). I was a bit of an odd kid though, so I figure I was unusual.
on the other hands, long rants, while a part of toxivity, aren't what people really think when we here "toxic internet gamer". They think strong/bigoted language, a complete disrespect for the person behind the screen, gatekeeping, and being overall unpleasant to be around. Kids certainly do do all of those more than adults (...hopefully).
I think we tend to see that sort of talk more on games like CoD or Battlefield. MOBAs and RTS have tended to skew older for a while now. The slurs are also there, but as part of screaming at you about build orders and the like.
I assume much of those angry redditors telling the mods to go pound sand are the same astroturfers that have been plaguing every hobby subreddit for a while now.
Yep. Like I mentioned the other day, 40% of the items removed in my largest sub is spam/bots that are removed by my various automod rules, mod bots, etc.
it's truly baffling how ignorant some Redditors are. then again, some of them are just there for the memes. they are not true Redditors in the essence, True Redditors are the ones that care for the community. these are just passersby that are there because they are entertained and then will jump ship if some better place offers their kind of entertainment.
Is this the "no true Scotsman" fallacy in action?
Some people would say that the folks who gather on Reddit for the memes, pics, puns, and other jokes... are the TRUE redditors.
It's probably better to say "casual browser" vs. "regular commenter". Even if the former outnumbers the latter, you can make an argument that the "hook" of reddit that makes it different from Instagram/TikTok is the focus on longer form discussions and communities bonding around topics, not necessarily personalities. Even if reddit does not (or doesn't care to) understand that and is trying to chase the TikTok dollars.
We can argue which is the "true reddit" until the cows come home. Which is ironic because "true" subreddit is also a in-group term on reddit that (in very brief summary) tends to mark a rejection of the memes and trying to focus on that discussion aspect again. But the "trueX" subs tend to be more niche than their "X" counterpart, so you can be the judge on that one.
There was a reason way back in 2010 why every default sub at the time banned advice animals, rage comics, rampant reposts, and more. Becsuse votes are done by that same silent majority Reddit is banking on using to weather the storm. Those same users don't, as reddit puts it, "come to them for support and belonging". They browse r/all and see a single stream of content, not a collection of cultures with their own rules. So it doesn't matter if a picture of boobs is on r/cars, they just see boobs. If they like boobs, it's an upvoted.
Mods spent years, over a decade cultivating and adapting their communities to get around what were frankly, site design issues. I think the admins underestimated this accumulated tribal knowledge.
Also 3) On a sub that big a not insignificant amount of votes is coming from people just scrolling their feed or even /r/all, blissfully unaware of what sub the boobs they're upvoting are in.
Yeah, even if you only got good-faith votes, it's been known basically forever (seriously, this was a topic of active consideration back when I joined Reddit… um… let's just go with "an embarrassingly long time ago") that a vote-based user content moderation system absolutely does not drive good content. The easier to consume a piece of content is, the more votes it will get, and so your "user-driven community" will immediately be awash in memes and low-effort garbage.
(And, um, porn, apparently. I'm guessing this is a special case of "marketing in general" given Reddit's extraordinarily thirsty demographics and site-wide rules around promotions.)
I wonder how long before the admins yoink this one.
A related question: do Reddit moderator tools work well for images and videos? Or are they all regular expression based and focused on text content?
Let's say they find some people willing to take over moderating /r/interestingasfuck. Will they have to battle what probably would be a sea of content trying to undermine the sub goals on their own, or would the tools help them with a lot of it?
If the tools aren't there to support them, I imagine at least the image and video-based subs are going to have a hard time operating normally in a hostile environment.
A lot of people have no idea how consuming it is to moderate a large, even somewhat large, anything.
Moderation is deceptively hard, even with rules.
https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20/masnicks-impossibility-theorem-content-moderation-scale-is-impossible-to-do-well/
I'm not sure if your post was meant to be in agreement, provide a different facet to my comment, be snarky orrrr... whatever. I'm not sure! I think this is the part where explicit context would be nice, and also a good reminder for me to practise context whenever I reply with noise.
This was a fascinating read — while I think it's an over-philosophical befuddlement of the inherent nature of individuality, it is true that
Simply put, Masnick's Impossibility Theorem is syntactic sugar to the core problem that is human ethics. It took me a while to realise that, and social media sure doesn't realise that either. Nothing is perfect, no one will be perfect, and we're all looking at this the wrong way.
We will never make a perfect system. What is more important is making a collective effort to effectively minimise and address mistakes.
Agreement & sharing of a link that (I felt) expanded on your comment a bit. Should have added more context, but I hate commenting on my phone (on me :p). Hope that clears it up
hugs
I cannot read tone over text. Text-tone deafness is something I significantly struggle with, as someone who is autistic.
When I said "whenever I reply with noise", I meant me. I addressed it as explicitly towards me as possible without repeating it. I usually reply with only emojis or small bits of text out of habit, cos it says enough about what I think. It's sorta similar but not exact to what argh said about "I hate commenting on my phone". I am sorry if it read like I thought his comment was noise, it's not. I genuinely didn't know the intention, and that's why I was veiled about it.
I loved the article he sent. I also think it's a wrapper over the human condition, and that can include social networking and communication. It's nice that it started discussion over the years and was shared a lot. To me, it's an opinion piece that highlights a concept rather than a formal theorem if that makes sense. It's there to communicate social theory in an informal way.
I do not think his comment or the article is noise. You seem to assume that I meant argh's reply was noise. I could reason that your response, in kind;
Those are risky assumptions! But hey, they're reasonable enough right? I could accuse you of these three assumptions. After all, the idea of standing your ground is something that's p noble. Eye for an eye, yeah? But I do not want a fight with you or anyone. So I did the next best thing, and did my best to be polite about it to argh. I'm still wrong about how I went about it, you are right. I could've politely asked. I could've assumed. I just do not have the luxury to assume good faith that easy. Pardon me for this, but the world is not kind to those who do not fit in.
I can do something tho! This is me practising good faith in you, and practising good faith in general. Assumptions make an arse out of you and me. That's why I don't really assume, and why I think context is nice to know. Then again, I'm human so I break this. I'm sure I broke this somewhere here.
I wanna stress that this isn't necessarily criticism. I just think this is hilarious, related to the complexity of content moderation and is something to think over. If you found this comment disorienting, overtly verbose, sprawling, unnecessary.
This is how I've felt for years.
If I had Exemplaries to use, you'd have mine right now. Context is hard, as is living in a brain that's not... cooperative sometimes. Thanks for contributing!
Honestly, I thought this was an unpopular opinion and was prepared to not get updooted a lot. Just went on w my day and posted elsewhere. I was really surprised the person before me deleted their comment.
I don't really care if I get an Exemplary. I don't want one. But if you insist and wish to wait until you get an Exemplary to use on this, that would be nice. An Exemplary would be crucial to highlight that fact that context deafness on the Internet IS real and DOES happen way more than most ppl think. It seems to be a norm to care about something's value to yourself first before considering others. I just wanted to speak my mind in a respectful manner. I don't deserve an Exemplary for just showing a form of class or polite behaviour. I also don't deserve an Exemplary over the person before me. I think that's just wrong.
All I want is for people to be less centred on themselves, and be kind without any possibility of reward or recognition. I fundamentally disagree that decency or good behaviour should be rewarded in a hierarchical system. I think you should best use the Exemplary on something nobody ever considers. A post, comment or such buried under, ignored by others and taken for granted. Those posts matter more than mine, and should be marked as Exemplary. If you think my post is deserving... feel free to reward me. I will humbly accept, even tho I do not wish for it.
With that being said, I must ask everyone to respect my wishes and let this subthread rest in peace now. I think any more replies will bastardise the point behind my comment, and there are other viewpoints to consider in this overall post.
Thank you for your time doors, and for everyone else, have a good night.
Moderators basically don't have any tools at all. Videos are the wild west and you have to actually watch them or react to reports.
They're awful. Default mod tools are basic as fuck - there's no checking for duplicates, EVERYTHING has to be manually reviewed.
I think before AutoModerator, a full description of Reddit's mod tools would have been "you can remove posts".
Even something as basic as locking a post wasn't added until October 2015, when the site was 10 years old.
Automod does so much heavy lifting for mods it's insane. The main drawback is the learning curve - I have lost count of the mod teams I joined short term just to set up their automod config because they had no one on the team who had enough technical knowledge to do it. I'd bet there are a shocking number of medium to large subs that have no automod config at all because the team doesn't even know it exists.
There's a few mods who are on hundreds of mod teams just for the bots they provide, without which the sub wouldn't be manageable. People seriously underestimate the sheer volume of comments and posts that larger subs get. And that's just a side concern - the big subs are used to it. When a small, niche sub that's not used to a lot of traffic hits the front page, all hell can break loose. God forbid it's a post about a woman, a minority, or (the worst) a child. I pushed for a "no kids" rule on r/gaming because of how stomach turning the comments were.
... and ban users. Don't forget that!
There was a whole range of mod tools available - all two of them.
I have to confess: there have been some subreddits I've been able to moderate basically singlehandedly solely because AutoMod was there to help carry the load. Thank you. Sincerely.
I used to help mod a small trades-related subscription just to assist in removing spam until some robot took my job. If I ever meet the guy who wrote it I'll give him a piece of my mind...
Thank you so much for AutoMod, it freed me from my spam prison!
To clarify, you mean modtools provided by reddit, right?
I'm not aware of any custom mod bot that parses images/videos based on their content.
There are some bots that check for image duplicates, nothing provided by reddit though, this is all dependent on the contributions of unpaid devs. Don't know of any for videos.
Admins don't care, and some user will set up /r/InterestingAsFuckNoPornBots which will take over, especially when admins start pushing it into people's feeds.
Eh, I mean for /r/interastingasfuck it's already true. /r/whoadude, /r/crazyfuckingvideos, /r/damnthatsinteresting, /r/nextlevel all effectively same the same content as /r/interestingasfuck, even if some them are supposed to be different they all converged into the same thing. Those other 4 are just open now, so if people don't like what's on /r/interestingasfuck there is certainly no lack of substitutes.
Maybe for general subs, sure. But that's simply becsuse those subs existed for years already. I'm not sure we'd get as many substitutes for something like r/gaming or r/technology. Or r/politics. They aren't the only respective subs for their domain, but their next biggest subs are a magnitude smaller (and some aren't all r/all).
r/shittylifeprotips has gone this route as well.
Curious to see how reddit reacts if it gains traction and more subs go the TOS only route - they took porn subs off the main pages, and now the big subs are making it visible again. The OF spam is only going to increase as more of them realize they have a new venue to advertise themselves. I'd be VERY surprised if this wasn't already in their "how to promote yourselves" sub.
It looks like r/interestingasfuck has marked itself fully NSFW, which should exclude it from /r/all. Might be due to aggressive caching so it could resolve itself eventually.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14eyx90/comprehensive_list_of_all_subs_with_mod_teams
It seems like things aren't going well.
Amazing. Malicious compliance in action. Lol
I think this is a great approach, but honestly I expect Reddit to replace the mods with some cherry-picked team of scabs soon. In the mean time, I need more popcorn!
Seeing the user response to these last few days has been very disheartening. I wasn't a mod but I know how important moderation is to maintaining good communities. I'm sure a lot of it is astroturfed, but the whole "unpaid jannies power grab" narrative picking up so much steam is gross to see. Glad I got in here when I did because I feel the community there is only going to grow more toxic with the loss of so many good mods.
In retrospect, we should have seen it coming.
There has been an ever increasing gap between longtime users and newer ones who don't understand what makes a subreddit work or fail. People who don't understand how crucial good moderation is for a high quality subreddit won't care if mods lose their ability to function — especially if they're already biased towards "fuck mods, let the votes decide."
One of the forms of protest I haven't seen yet is simply adding all these people as mods. Looking forward to watching that one.
My only experience with moderating is briefly moderating /r/banished (it's a city-building type game). We would get multiple daily posts from people reporting that the game's screenshots were being used to promote fake apps/games elsewhere. The posts were obviously coming from a good place of concern, but they were routinely the most upvoted thing for a while and the resulting discussions went nowhere because the game's creator wasn't on the subreddit. In an effort to curb the amount of posts about it, we created a sticky megathread outlining the problem, why we couldn't help, and what to do (report it to the site hosting the ad). Didn't work. Nobody read the post. Put it in the rules. Didn't work. Nobody read the rules. So finally we banned those kinds of posts outright and started deleting them and left a polite note pointing to the stickythread. It solved the problem immediately.
We basically started assuming people could behave like adults, read the rules, check the stickied posts, search the sub, etc. before posting. But nope. Only after all that had failed we stepped in with active moderating. Still got called a power-tripping mod. Still got a lot of people whining that we spend too much time on reddit if we're seeing the posts so frequently (because they never do!). And of course lots of "If people don't want to see it, they'll downvote it", which is just a fantastic way to kill a subreddit.
I gave up on moderating shortly after. Just wasn't worth the time or effort. And that was on an incredibly small subreddit. No idea how the big sub mods manage to do it for so long.
The negative side of the Lucky 10k. You're not arguing with a dozen of the same users bringing up the same topic again (that's very easy to fix, and it can't be that easy). You deal with a stream of new users falling into the same traps, and a site not designed to properly prompt the user to not fall into these trap. Quite the contrary, Reddit doesn't mind a bit of in-fighting. More comment, more traffic, more ad views. It goes against the goals of a civilized community.
Ah, that's one of those "I gotta try this" games I still haven't gotten around to playing.
But yes, that's pretty much exactly everyone's experience modding. One of the small tweaks that would have helped reddit is finding a way to expand the number of users involved in moderation.
I just got caught up in an argument in a subreddit that I and another moderator (the person who gave me my invite code for Tildes!) built from the ground up - but which both of us have since left, at separate times for different reasons. However, before that, we put a shipload of work into growing that subreddit over many years - and, 10 years later, it has a very strong community of over 80,000 people who love the subreddit and what it does. But the current subreddit mods have now spun off an instance on Lemmy... and the users are turning on them.
As a result of that argument, I'm realising something.
Last week, in another subreddit on another account... I polled the users to ask if they wanted the subreddit to participate in the 48-hour shutdown. 70% said "yes", so we did.
But now I know that those "yes" voters were never on the moderators' side. They were on their own side. They were worried that Reddit executives were taking away their favourite apps, so of course they wanted the moderators to protest against Reddit taking away their apps. It was a selfish interest.
Now that they think moderators are taking away their subreddit, they're expressing the same selfish interest.
This was never about a principle. It was always just about redditors getting what they wanted, how they wanted: "We want our subreddits on our apps, and anyone who doesn't give us what we want is our enemy."
They don't care about moderators, even though they supported moderators who shut down their subreddits. That was just a "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" moment.
Any moderators who think Reddit users are on their side in this dispute are deluding themselves. The users are only on their own side.
And there's really nothing wrong with that. At the end of the day that's true of the mods, too. I wouldn't be surprised if there's at least some moderators out there who are just upset that they're going to lose the ability to automatically ban people for having any post history at all in a list of subs they don't like a mile long. Not all of them, but then not all of the users only care about third party mobile apps. And the ones who do often have concerns about how shitty and intrusive the official app is, it's not just an aesthetic or even a UX preference.
I guess what I'm saying is there's layers to this and it's really not surprising that moderators and users are focusing on different things. Even within those groups, there's going to be subgroups more upset about some aspects of the change than others.
My realisation was to do with the fact that moderators are surprised - because users were so supportive during the shutdown last week, but aren't supportive during the other protest actions this week. It does seem strange for people who supported you last week to not support you this week... until you realise that they didn't actually support you last week, either. That was just a coincidental alignment of interests, rather than actual solidarity.
What percentage of subreddit users/subscribers voted in the polls? The yes voters may well have been supportive of the mods for mod reasons, while the folks complaining now weren’t a part of that original cohort but are now coming out of the woodwork because they didn’t like the sub going private.
Obviously a small percentage, because of the 90:9:1 rule of the internet, but there were more votes in that poll than on any recent posts in the subreddit. That poll brought lurkers out of the woodwork.
That's very possible.
I can only speak for myself not for the community as a whole. But I at least don't fall into that category. I never used third party adds. That reddit app people love to complain about? I was on it daily for a long time. Ads never bugged me.
What does bug me though, is the owner of a platform lying, and making disabled users the lowest priority. My dad was disabled so it fills me with fury to act like those users don't matter as much.
I voted in the subs to join the blackout. And then I left. I think that's why votes and opinions have changed. Those of us who were supporting the community have left, those who never cared have remained.
What's even more gross is that using the term "jannies" on the internet comes out of the nastier parts of 4chan and white supremacist circles who are mad about having their hateful posts/comments deleted by moderators on various social media/being banned, and goes hand in hand with them using a certain similar slur for transgender people.
Let's be clear, the term is not exclusively used by bigots. It's been used (internet-)popularly for a long enough time that we really shouldn't treat it as some dogwhistle.
I can't say I've ever seen anybody use it online until the last few years.
I've seen it used a lot on Kiwi Farms back when you could reach it without 200 hoops. I have certainly avoided using it to insult moderators now for several years due to the connotation.
You can actually access kiwifarms pretty easily now just by downloading Tor and going to the site, and tor even has a mobile app.
Not that there's much of value there. I'm fascinated by some of the strange things they discuss, but the tone of that community makes me cringe. Ironic, since it exists to react to cringe content.
I may have been somewhat active there a few years back when a streamer I followed was getting cancelled (and it didn't take, thank god) and that's a great way to summarize it. I would be a bit more honest: They're a cadre of hateful people watchers who turned their rotten eyes to others when Chris-chan stopped giving them that dopamine hit. And they are hostile, bitter, and relish in it.
I hope I never need to go there again, so them going to .onion is perfectly fine.
I'm not sure how much of it is astroturfed. Consider:
There will inevitably, for many reasons, still be supporters of Reddit for a while. It happened in the last blackout and this one likely won't be different
It's also inevitable as users migrate to other platforms or just stop using Reddit as frequently.
I think it will also hasten the decline, as the site culture shifts away from whatever vestiges of community was left.
Just to give you some faith: it's likely because users who care have stopped commenting or left altogether. The only ones left are the ones who don't care much.
I never used third party apps and am not a mod, I just got really grossed out by Huffman's attitude and blatant lies. So I have deactivated my account and gone from visiting Reddit for 2 hours a day to 10 minutes at most. No account, so visiting on the website without an app, and I cannot comment or upvote.
Users like me are in full support of the mod actions taken previously and taken now, but we're not engaging to support your effort. It just sucks that those that remain don't care as much. Those are the users we have to get to leave by letting Reddit go to shit.
I'm a mod over at /r/gunners. There's a few other subs that have popped up over the years by users who don't like that we banned banned them for breaking our rules.
The big one is /r/ArsenalFC, they remained open during the blackout so a lot of users checked them out. As soon as we re-opened our Daily Discussion thread was full of people praising us for the work we do to keep the sub ticking.
It's incredible how much abuse we get from users who believe that just because they've created an account they should be able to do/say whatever they want.
Who cares? Tildes is full of activity, and so are other alternatives to reddit. Reddit can turn into another corporate infotainment social media website. The important thing is that people who value good conversation have another place to go to.
I also believe is astroturfing. All these comment starting appearing after the two days blackout, didn't see one before
I also mentioned on reddit that a lot of the comments smacked of astroturfing and I immediately got lit up by other commenters, calling me cringe.
Yeah it kinda sucks to see this happen but I’m not at all surprised. Explains why many subs now just post random pics to maliciously comply.
Yeah, the real response should "yes the subreddit is private, no it is not closed down, we are still posting."
Saying subreddits are "closed" is giving the admins this scummy angle to play. Subreddits can be private, there have always been private subs, nothing stopping one from suddenly becoming private and closing off to the public. They're still being moderated.
The admins can see subreddits, even when they're set to private. They can see if a subreddit is active or not.
Sorry it wasn't clear, I'm aware of that, I was suggesting that mods could still keep posting within the subreddit occasionally to keep it "active". As long as there is the occasional post and responsive moderation, the sub is still active, the bar is very low.
Yea what has stopped subreddits from operating privately in the past? I used to be part of several active private subs. It was never a problem until big subs got involved and impacted reddit's front page.
Nothing as far as I'm aware. There's no rule in the ToS against taking a subreddit private.
Thing is, the admins don't care about the ToS, they care about what corporate Reddit tells them to.
The amount of hate I'm getting on reddit is really fucking with my mental health. I need to just cut the cord. I'm going to resign as mod everywhere.
You gotta do what's right for you. In the end, you don't owe these people anything.
MOD here, we're nice people (*smiles creepily)
This whole Reddit drama has hit sovereign citizen mental gymnastics for me.
There are one of two, clear outcomes:
a subreddit actually cares and moves to another platform. I think
startedStarTrek did this.a subreddit throws a temper tantrum while relying entirely on the platform to throw that tantrum. At some point, they have to realize they simply don’t own the platform in the way they think they do.
Which is costing reddit money in 2 ways.. trying to nanny all these subreddits, spinning plates, playing whack a mole... employee time
but also, more and more time is going by that reddit is a dumpster fire.... the big bulk users who stop coming, break the habit, because its shit, hurting ad revenue... and giving other places like tildes chance to grow.
if you are here, reading this, and not a Mod. Best thing is just don't check reddit at all.. keep numbers low.
if you're a mod, just make it a mess as long as you can i guess.
I think many people are over estimating the "cost" of "nanny" these subreddits.
Small sub-reddits really aren't hard to moderate. They're going to continue to have people who are willing to step in and run those communities.
Moderation only becomes a problem in the large communities. Reddit has a unique architecture that aggregates the largest communities. Unlike FB and Twitter which need to moderate a near limitless number of groups and posts, Reddit really only needs to moderate 5k sub-reddits to maintain a high-quality frontpage. Outside of that, they'll likely find enough willing people to run the smaller sub-reddits.
Problem is, FB and Twitter are able to do this because they pay moderators.
Reddit is currently not profitable, and one of their biggest expenses is salaries, despite not paying moderators at all.
FB has 15,000 paid moderators, but also has some amount of unpaid moderation because users 'own' FB groups and are pressured to keep them clean of rule-breaking content -- and many do so simply because they don't want that stuff there, so they delete posts and ban users themselves which reduces load on moderators.
Twitter had thousands of moderators as well but many of them have been fired now since Musk took over, and moderation has gone into the toilet + there is an increasing amount of rule-breaking content on Twitter, there's been a huge increase in the amount of illegal content, threats, bot use, hate speech etc that Twitter is not taking care of. This has scared off some advertisers and is now starting to result in lawsuits from various parties, because in addition to not removing things like violent/hateful content, Twitter is also not removing copyrighted content upon request, because they have almost no moderation at this point.
I meant nanny the moderators like limiting pics to just John Oliver, allowing porn, going dark, etc
This is a false dichotomy. Especially given your "cares and leaves reddit" vs "throws a tantrum" phrasing.
What about the people that care about what reddit has been and would rather burn it down trying to keep it than give in to spez's tyrannical vision?
You will end up in one of the situations that I've described. The vast majority of Reddit users simply do not care. Communities will either become Reddit moderated or migrate elsewhere. So far, I've seen an astonishingly few communities migrate. Leading me to believe that most communities will simply fizzle out without a bang.
Even with the protests, Reddit still had a lot of content. The majority of consumers were mildly inconvenienced for a day.
I'd take Reddit cashing in on that "moderators should be paid" check they made as a personal win. If you burn the goodwill of those dedicated enough to put up with the madness, it will cost you. Quite literally in this case.
Sure, but reddit's response has been far more aggressive than I expected, especially in the context of previous protests. They're really sensitive here for some reason.
There's nothing wrong with fizzling out. The key point is "fuck reddit." That can take place in many ways, but the fact that you see most mods returning with malicious compliance is promising. They'd rather destroy what they built than give it to spez.
Things are escalating once more - reddit's changing subs back to SFW without consulting the mods, and threatening users for posting nsfw content even in subs/posts that are flagged as nsfw.
source 1 NSFW.
source 2 SFW
There's also reports of mods of public subs being shuffled down the mod list for their participation in private subs.
Just to play Advocatus Diaboli (this is not necessarily my opinion, as a moderator or as an observer)...
What if the moderators are doing this to keep their grubby mitts on "their" subreddits, so they don't get kicked off the mod teams? What if it is just a powerplay?
(I can imagine at least some moderators thinking this way, even if only in their deep dark secret heart.)
It definitely is a powerplay. But, If it was really only about retaining their power as moderators, then they wouldn't bother with malicious compliance; the most certain way to retain that power would be by returning the subreddit to normal operation.
I think these mods know they're not going to be sticking around for very long after third-party apps go dark. Most of them have spent countless hours of the past several years helping curate, grow, and cultivate the subreddit community and culture; and now they feel like Reddit Inc is pushing them towards the door, so instead of just passing on the baton and walking away, they're taking a torch to it on their way to the door.
Oh I'm sure that's a factor. Being invested in something you've volunteered hundreds of hours into is only natural.
But I wouldn't characterize it as a power play. Reddit has long been balancing between mods, users, and its own interests — poorly, IMHO. Reddit has sided with the portion of their user base that thinks mods are janitors.
“I do not consent. I am a person, and I do not recognize your authority in this matter.”
See r/wow. People voted to do one thing, moderators decided to do another. It's probably one of the bigger temper tantrums out of all this drama
Which leads us to the likely risk a lot of the users simply accept defeat and stay where they are, as they need that dopamine hit that reddit offers. I think its safe to say those who chose to leave reddit are gone, and are moving on with their lives. Just like with Twitter.
A lot a talk about the importance of community for a company explicitly ignoring their community.
Yep, that stuck out to me too.
Really? The benefit of the community is all? Because how everything I saw went down, that wording would be more appropriately "Subreddits exist for Reddit to profit off the community of users who come to them for support and belonging through mandatory adtech and data harvesting that's only valuable if you're a good steward of the community."
I don't really have a problem with a company seeking a profit, but I'm not going to use their product if those are the terms, and I do have a problem with a company gaslighting their volunteer labor about why they're there and what value they provide.
Guess they gotta rake in what profit they can before the millions of open-internet roving LLMs flood in and utterly destroy the ad impression to conversion ratio. Clock's ticking.
Seems like the protest is all but fizzled over? Most of the big subs have reopened now. /r/nba, /r/apple, /r/nfl, /r/nhl, /r/anime, and so forth. Like 3-4 are doing the John Oliver thing, but honestly I don't think Reddit really cares. If the people there are engaged in posting John Oliver pictures, that's fine with them. Once the community gets bored with posting John Oliver pictures, then the admins can go back and say, "hey, the people in your sub don't want to post john oliver pictures anymore, stop or get yeeted".
User sentiment is heavily against the mods as well. They're getting blasted on every sub, maybe nowhere more than /r/nba, but basically everywhere, from the big subs to /r/tulsa.
It is what it is. In the end, I don't think mods have the kind of brand cache to pull it off; if you ask someone that goes on any particular sub to name a single mod on the sub, almost no one can. The ones that can, only know because they hate that particular mod. So outside of very specific subs like /r/askhistorian, they are for the most part fungible to the reddit populace at large.
Saying user sentiment is "heavily against the mods everywhere" is disingenuous and I'm not sure how you even came to that conclusion. There are tons of huge subs where the users are going full gung ho with the whole thing and even praising the mods. Some subreddits like you linked are anti-mod sure, but there are plenty more large subs who are all for it like: /r/pics, /r/aww, /r/videos, /r/interestingasfuck, /r/piracy, /r/gifs, /r/art, /r/wellthatsucks, etc.
It's also worth noting that more and more communities are joining this new form of protest as news spreads.
IMO, there is a distinction in users. How many of the users upset about the closure of their favorite online watering holes were actively valuable members, how many were lurkers, and how many only gave low-engagement comments? The answer assuredly varies from community to community, but it should be considered instead of having simple majority wins votes.
I think there's a larger distinction as well. For an example, what % of /r/nba users are redditors who want to discuss basketball, and what % wanted to discuss basketball and ended up on reddit? Two very different crowds with different goals.
The cases of /r/nba and /r/anime are a little different as it turns out mods didn't participate in their own boycott and continued using the sub while it was private.
/r/anime mod here — While the subreddit was shut down we were still on Reddit (though from personal experience it was a pretty dramatic reduction) in large part because we were getting dozens of requests every hour to join the subreddit. For mobile users the message about why we were private either wasn't shown, or wasn't shown in full. So we were active in modmail informing people why the subreddit was closed.
While we were here, some mods (myself included) threw some comments in episode discussion threads and CDF (our off-topic weekly casual discussion thread) for kicks. From our perspective it was just shitposting since there was basically nobody to respond to things, and most of us would normally use Discord for the types of comments we would send.
To us, the protest was closing the sub. That's what got the attention of Reddit (though it seems that the impact of doing so will ultimately be minimal) and whether or not the comments were left wasn't going to have any meaningful impact on any metrics for Reddit. For us, it was just something silly to do, though we can see how that would be perceived.
The shamelessness of it really astounds me. I hope someone keeps a database of all the mods who cross that line.
Yeah, absolutely, that's why half of Popular is rage-bait, propaganda, and videos of people getting shot. Maybe Reddit could grow a spine and try appealing to a userbase that doesn't find a sense of support and belonging in that kind of content...?
I wish all moderators and want-be-to moderators would wake up and realize Reddit HQ doesn't care about them nor the community. I mean sure, as a mod you can get a sense of power, but it's not worth the cost of free labour. Whatever "mask of friendliness" Reddit admins were wearing has been torn right off. Forcing subs to reopen? Removing mods at will? What the fuck are they thinking, waging war on their users like this? The whole situation is comical and I hope it all comes crashing down.
I mod and I am absolutely aware that reddit gives no shits about me. I don't mod for the sake of reddit, I mod because I want communities for those subjects and no better place exists at this time.
Reddit as a whole is great when it comes to empty promises.
They're not just forcing open the very big subreddits. I just received the "please reopen your subreddit" message in a sub with only fifty subscribers. I'm the only person who has ever posted in it. I suppose I'll just ignore it.
It was always going to happen.
Thing is, Reddit won't be the same. The real content will be gone. It'll just be a collection of power trippy mods who treat subs like their personal corner of the net.
Reddit may not care, but users will.
Look, I moderate online ( not Reddit or the like) and stood with the mods in the blackout. The r/pics response was amusing, but ultimately harmless, but the direction that the mods of my local city have decided to take (apparently there was a discord poll ??) is frustrating. It's now a fairly useless subreddit, when before it was a small community of local people able to connect and get help here. Now it's just troll posts and the mods are deleting people who are posting stuff relevant to them and aren't in line with their "new direction".
Honestly kinda over it, and this is coming from a 13+ year user of RiF. I was prepared to drop my phone usage of Reddit, and use it solely through my PC with RES and old.reddit.
Just venting I guess, it's thankless work being a mod, I know, but that's the breaks. This temper tantrum they're currently engaging in is just turning our local community subreddit against them.
(Sorry if this doesn't make sense, no coffee and a head cold making me suffer).
I'm not surprised in the slightest, and I think a lot of moderators lacked morals to begin with when they re-opened their subs and allowed alternative forms of protest.
Except for the InterestingAsFuck mods, who decided to basically allow anything and everything that still abided by Reddit's site-wide rules, effectively becoming a porn sub. This is fucking genius for a number of reasons, but mainly because advertisers don't want to associate themselves with hardcore pornography and because this protest is actively harming Reddit in the sense that they're restricting API access to NSFW content.
Adding new rules to only allow "sexy pics of John Oliver" is just funny and giving more exposure/publicity to Reddit. Advertisers are cool with that. Straight-up turning the site into porn though...
Moderators have all the power and they could easily make the admins fold if they collectively disable automoderator, unban everybody from all their subs, then just announce "we're not removing/banning content anymore, go nuts."
But as stated earlier, I'm not surprised they're doing this. I mean they're the ones folding over anything that that actually threatens the sliver of power they hold over someone, because they're all just like Spez - power tripping megalomaniacs.
I'm amused that /r/listentothis with its 18M subscribers remains completely locked days after the 'unlocking' begins. Even the admins know nothing posted there can ever reach the front page so they don't bother with it. They did force /r/music back open.
r/KGB
r/Stasi