133
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First they came for /r/pics ... now Reddit are coming for the individual personal subreddits
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- Title
- Doc Edward Morbius ⭕ (@dredmorbius@toot.cat)
- Authors
- Doc Edward Morbius ⭕
- Published
- Jun 22 2023
I'm really struggling with Reddit right now. It has been my go to, favorite website for more than ten years. Before I buy anything, before I visit anywhere, when I'm planning a vacation, when I just want to kill some time looking at cute dog pictures, Reddit was always my go-to. It was a wonderful website that allowed people to build and foster their own communities and became an absolute wealth of information.
Now though, now... I dunno. I had hope that they would see sense. That they were going after the people that helped build them up to the "Front Page Of The Internet." Burning bridges, relationships, and disregarding the countless unpaid hours that mods have put into this site. Looking at all of that and saying "screw it."
I'm visiting less and less and enjoying the time I spend there less and less. As other sites grow and the alternatives become more attractive I see myself ditching it completely for something better, just like I did with MySpace all those years ago...
The waste of it though is killing me but if we're all honest with each other the writing has been on the walls for awhile. They even shut down Reddit Gifts and gave us nothing.
Yea, I feel the same way. I actually visit this site now more than Reddit. This places reminds me of the old Slashdot days in some ways, and I guess I missed that.
Reddit has been slowly turning into the next instagram / tiktok / fb / whatever over the years with emphasis on memes and pics, and less emphasis on actual discussion. And I guess I didn't really notice until now.
I feel like I'm also now hyperaware of the comments on every post where like 90% of them are just making the same obvious joke over and over. This was always there and part of the culture, but it was mixed in with good information. Now it's not.
I couldn't agree with your last point more. When you can see a thread title or a post and KNOW what half of the replies are going to say, word for word, because everybody copies and pastes the same thing it's just exhausting.
Comments being derivative and without depth has been the norm in Reddit for a long time. Also the toxicity of the community. Even if it’s only a small amount of vocal trolls; It drew me away from the site. It’s a shame really, but maybe it is the fate of all social networks.
I will make the claim that this is the fate of commercial networks. As soon as there is a business interest in engagement, I think the lesson from the past years is, that it leads to favoring a toxic environment.
I think that progression is the idea encapsulated in enshittification
It's pretty hard to not use Reddit as a massive database of user reviews and experiences... I'll likely still use it for that, and always will.
Even for news, I find it to be superior, which is annoying. I'm sure in time this forum will be active enough to supply a similarly high quality and diverse news feed.
For the time, this forum is better for interaction, which is probably the largest portion of my "online consumption". I'd love for this site to me more than that though.
That's pretty much how I feel.
Reddit was a one-stop-shop for news-related items. I could catch up on what's going on in the world, in the NBA, in technology, in pro-wrestling, in the games that I play, without having to visit 50 different sites. As good as Tildes is, it contains only a small subset of what's contained in Reddit, which is why even though I hang out here a lot, I still have to drop in on Reddit if I want information on some of the more niche areas. I'm hoping that Tildes can replace Reddit over time (mainly because I really love the interface here - it's clean as heck and text-based) but as it's still in development, I'm not counting on that happening soon.
Actually I wonder about that.
Reviews get outdated fast: products get worse (and rarely, better) and new products pop up. Some things are reliable and always will be, but those tend to be more well-known, and therefore more likely to appear in new review sites. Reddit is unmatched in its reliable, high-quality reviews today, but with the new sites growing in popularity, maybe not in 5 years.
Also, while Reddit's news helps me stay informed, personally I don't think it's that great. Often the linked articles aren't good and the comments are reactionary; there are situations where I see something which seems exaggerated, and several comments deep, there's a huge caveat none of the above comments mentioned or outright contradicted. More importantly is that anything really important, I'm guaranteed to see or hear about somewhere else.
By news I really just mean community updates, scientific updates, and general global event notifications. The quality of more local, or partisan news will always be a little suspicious. Most of the news there, at least that I subscribe to, is in the first few categories I mentioned, and is generally decent quality. The lack of specialized groups, categories, and volume leaves a lot to be desired here in the news department for me.
As for product reviews, I'm not explicitly talking about product reviews, but more generally about user experiences. I can search for how people liked a place, how they dealt with certain symptoms, how they designed something... Etc and I'll get some input. That also isn't true for this site, because it just has no volume lifetime yet. Hopefully this'll change! For now, I use Reddit for that.
Spez said it himself:
That pretty much solidifies the priorities here, and thus far they have not found a way to profit off of moderation nor memes. Just indirectly through free labor and ads. This isn't something a site with the best interests of the user would say, not out loud. Especially not while the house is on fire.
If the company makes no profit. Company goes out of buisness. Is that in the best interests of users?
Reddit has a very hard time making money because they lack good ways to monetize. They can sell ads but ad blockers exist. They cant really require subscriptions or paywalls because people will bounce off that and they know it. They could maybe take donations? But thats not really a buisness model that can make any kinda profit, and i think its fair that they want to make a profit.
So what do? I dont think third party apps make or break their buisness, but i can absolutly see them being out of other good ideas and trying to make the most out of what they have. Surely theres some mismanagement going on, but thats kinda besides the point of reddit being a giant site that doesn't have great ways to make money.
It's an interesting question to ponder, for sure. Something something die a hero... People miss Vine but few seems to have ill will towards it.
But I think it really comes down to how you message it to the user. based on a previous post here, I think the key is Don’t insult the intelligence of your users. I may be naive, but I believe a lot of this fire would have been prevented even if they were blunt and just said "we are closing down the public API, reach out to Reddit if you want quotes ". Something many other sites do. It would send a clear message that they want tighter control on the API. Instead, we get the strong arm, passive aggressive stance of "well we welcome development on apps, just pay us a bazillion dollars". And now "we care about community", which is not a sentiment many users I interacted with would share. It all feels artificial, and they are hoping that reddit takes the bait (to be fair, I think many will).
But then again, maybe not. The other key in that article is Create more value than you capture and Reddit hasn't been the best at this. If the above theoretical announcement was combined with significant improvements to the app, it could have worked. As it is, it would still cause some (but less) fires, because it goes back to not respecting the user.
This was ultimately a build up from years of frustration. The proper "thing to do" would be to go back to 2017/6 or so and proper address user feedback on the app and new reddit. It's much easier to forgive monetization if you (the monetizee) feel you are being heard. But the world of coporate rarely ever makes you feel that way.
I cancelled my Premium over this. For the very first time, had it since it was introduced simply out of wanting to support the site.
But as you say, if it feels like all that money goes into a vacuum of buying Porsches and Yachts while the actual development is done on a shoestring budget with 0 oversight and not even money spent on some UX consulting, it's hard to justify further investment.
More specifically, they want to get traded publicly. At that moment, any concern for your actual content or product goes out of the window. Graph goes up, nothing else matters.
And I mean from the perspective of an owner I get it. Cash out. Stop worrying about things. Just take the money. But it's annoying for the site, more so because Reddit had no reason to be unprofitable, they control their own growth by what they allow, if the costs explode slow the growth.
Is there actually somewhere a breakdown of finances for reddit? If they were not profitable instead of not profitable enough they are doing something wrong. They have/had several massive advantages(that are tied into the disadvantages from financial perspective). They have/had untold millions of hours of unpaid volunteer moderator labor per year, they have/had thriving development community around them enabling them to make the changes in interface/app they did without immediately kicking off what is happening now.
The next is probably naive but not actively destroying their goodwill with community would have had an effect(the question is course how big of one) in people being less likely to run adblockers and more likely to subscribe. They have had a practically exclusive niche of information repository and a community that was fairly resistant to their attempts to facebook-ize it. What I really do not get is why would someone(using this kind of social media) choose it over the actual FB/Twitter once the content has about the same quality everywhere?
spez outright said "Not Profitable"
Spez said many things. Some of them have even been verified.
Didn't reddit, once upon a time, have a Bitcoin wallet for donations and as a payment option for reddit gold?
Maybe? they almost certainly converted it to real money though so they could pay salaries and bills with it though.
I was pretty active with Reddit Gifts and was hoping the community around it would make something new. Unfortunately, that never happened.
They did make something new. It was called Imzy (Dan McComas is the RedditGifts founder, and a former SVP at Reddit), but it unfortunately failed. :(
Part of the reason it failed is because they allowed user created groups right from the start, so they ended up with thousands of largely empty, inactive groups since they didn't yet have the userbase to populate them. The whole site ended up looking like a ghost town as a result, and that's why we don't have user created groups here yet either (and maybe never will).
p.s. Interesting (and prescient) interview with Dan here:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/dan-mccomas-reddit-product-svp-and-imzy-founder-interview.html
Excessive groups was a big problem.
Another was that Imzy permitted (and encouraged) serial pseudonymity including different identities on each conversation.
As with many exodus-based communities (Imzy was fairly strongly anti-Reddit), there was a strong contingent with a huge anti-Reddit obsession. (Not entirely unfounded, but it fed into some highly toxic actions.)
I made the ... probably unwise ... decision to use an avatar I'd created in part based on my own subreddit, /r/dredmorbius, a/k/a "the dreddit". (I still use that, for the time being, on my toot.cat profile, along with a hero based on an earlier Google+ bit.)
That was apparently waving a red cape before a herd of bulls. The responses I received at Imzy were ... incomprehensibly hostile. Staff were little help. I'd documented this in part at Ello and my own subreddit (the latter is now closed in protest, as the larger thread here describes).
My view is that a chief failure of Imzy was in trying to solve Reddit's problems of scale without first solving the how to scale problem.
Tildes is a strong counterpoint to that, and whilst it's grown very modestly over the past seven years, has not descended into pathological behaviour as exhibited either by Imzy during its brief life, or Reddit over nearly two decades.
Oof. We had a bit of a similar situation here when a certain prominent, well-known/infamous reddit "karmawhore" made an account here. They were treated with incredible hostility and Deimos ended up locking the topic and expressing his profound disappointment in everyone for it. That was during a pretty big influx of new users though, so the vast majority of those replying were brand new accounts. It has always stuck with me though, since I was so sad and disappointed to see that sort of thing happen here too. And I hope that should someone like that join Tildes again, the community here now would act a lot more nicely. :(
Quite some years ago I'd realised that amongst the problems with using Reddit as a personal blogging space (my avatar on the Fediverse is a relic of that, if you'd not put the two together) was that I do not in fact have any permanent claim to that space.
Reddit's previous policies of moderator re-assignment bothered me. The policies apparently instituted September 2022 and being rolled out aggressively in recent days ... have not weakened my concerns.
And, checking in now, I find a day-old modmail to /r/dredmorbius, a subreddit which only ever was my own personal posts with comments from a few friends, and about 1,000 subscribers ... has received a notice to reclaim by /u/Modcodeofconduct, screenshot here.
I have not abandoned the sub. I had closed it in protest of Reddit's continued failings and war against its volunteer moderators and general community.
And I will not go quietly.
Yeah, a few other mods of micro subs (we're talking double digit subscribers) have gotten that message. It is very odd and frankly makes no sensse for reddit to care. They must have done some nigh global broadcast to any and all subs that went private this month, regardless of context.
It's especially odd that a personal sub was hit. "Personalities" never really took off (except for maybe some model accounts), and it's still odd for many to think of a user having their own "sub".
I have a couple private subreddits with 2 or 3 members. Just logged in and do not have any such threats yet, but this is a good reminder that there's no such thing as private on somebody else's site.
I'm deeply sorry to hear this. I've always appreciated your commentary, and I owe you a personal debt of gratitude for the invite to Tildes during the G+ Apocalypse.
There's just nothing else yet which provides an author or creator with the broad reach to an interested/participatory audience, depth of postings, public searchability, ease of community creation/management (by comparison with self-hosting a Mastodon instance), low cost, and variety of media that Reddit did (albeit grudgingly).
I don't know if you've got the ability to export /r/dredmorbius in any format that might be reimported elsewhere.
That's one of the greatest tragedies of modern social media - the effective vendor lock-in which is unbreachable by mere users. Cory Doctorow and others have demanded data portability as a condition for an open Internet. Unfortunately, that makes platforms into generic utilities which basically trade off who has the nicest skins or tools, instead of walled feudalist castles that would rather see the serfs' content destroyed than freed.
I'd actually manually combed through, downloaded, and updated all of my posts a couple of years ago (using a terminal-mode Reddit client).
The system I'd saved that work to has since died.
I'm ... looking at other options. Life keeps getting in the way.
Would Substack be good for this?
They messaged our tiny city subreddit that had less than 500 subs and gave them the ultimatum to unprivate or face deletion, I was stunned at how petty they are being about this
They sent me a message as well and I just told them to do what they want since their site is going the way of Digg anyways. I should actually go and check to see if I'm still the moderator.
So they threatened to delete your subreddit unless you unprivated it? I don't understand what's going on here...
"If we cannot have it, nobody shall!!!!!"
If you had told me that at the beginning of the month I'd have deleted every comment and my account, I would've laughed at you. This all happened so fast.
"How did you lose your faith in Reddit?"
"Slowly at first, then suddenly."
Apologies to Hemmingway.
This is pretty typical for reddit - all the foresight and thoughtfulness of your average rattlesnake, total ignorance of history, cocksure arrogance, stunning social and programming ineptitude, with no gratitude at all for all of the data we dumped on them for free for almost two decades. In fact the whole problem is that they were too stupid to make money on it while tons of third parties did make money on it. Now they want to take everyone's ball away, dictate terms to volunteers, and charge everyone rent. We know how this story inevitably ends.
This whole thing has been a fucking mess. Put aside Reddit's stance on this. That's whatever. But the manner in which they're doing things to try and regain control is gross - changing rules on the fly with no thought as to how they might be abused in the future, no communication, and blanket automation for demands to reopen subreddits. It's a masterclass in how not to react to a crisis. If I'm an investor or an advertiser, why would I want to tie myself to a company with such awful leadership after this?
On a personal note, my subreddit /r/technews got the demand to reopen a couple days ago. I was by far the most active mod on the team with over 8k mod actions in the last year and was the 2nd longest tenured mod. All of us except the mod we added to the team last year were in agreement to stay closed. We told reddit this and they gave the subreddit to the new mod team member who promptly promised to reopen the sub. So I went and removed myself from all but 2 of my subreddits I moderate. Most of them were pretty active and I was either the only mod or the only active mod maintaining the subreddit. I went down from 30 subs to those 2 that I moderate. Those two are pretty active (and I'm the most active mod by a long shot in both), but I'm going to be moderating in them a lot less - especially once July 1st comes along since I won't be able to mod via mobile anymore.
If Reddit doesn't value the 8+ years in some of these subs that I've worked for free for them, why should I help them in any way going forward?
Exactly right, and if I had been an active mod I believe I would feel and do similarly. Despite being a 15+ yr redditor I could never bring myself to mod a subreddit for long, or with much effort.
I appreciate the work you've put in over the years, even if no one from reddit does.
A further update:
The Reddit story goes deeper, and drags in Ycombinator and its popular news aggregator Hacker News
My HN submission earlier today about Reddit seeking to seize my personal subreddit of going on ten years drew 405 votes and 299 comments, but ranked 42nd on the archive page, well below posts with far fewer votes and/or comments.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36434885
I've inquired as to whether that was due to flags or HN moderator actions (automated or manual).
But ...
... HN's chief moderator dang had commented earlier today that Reddit content is now penalised, and has been since "a while ago".
I note that this conflicts with, and contradicts, a comment from a week ago reiterating HN's policy of moderating less not more on stories concerning YC companies, specifically noting that this was despite the somewhat distant-in-time and tenuous present relationship between YC and Reddit.
And that comment appears to be the first HN's mod team bothered mention the fact, as an HN site search reveals:
The fact is that Reddit are an Internet juggernaut, that they are going explicitly against prior commitments, promises, and policies (both sitewide and in my case specifically communicated to me three years ago by a Reddit admin ggAlex: https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/dt527o/no_this_subreddit_is_not_fully_dead_yet_but/ (first comment on that link).
This war-against-its-power-users has made international headlines.
HN plays a de facto role of customer-support-of-last-resort, which dang has specifically acknowledged
See comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320816 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34941474.
And yes, that can be repetitive and annoying and repetitively annoying ... but ... it is often one of the only viable venues for those who are disempowered to be heard.
Or, in /u/toxlab's case, the dead.
HN's present Reddit policy both amplifies an existing power discrepancy (that of Reddit members against the company) and puts HN's own credibility at risk.
HN cannot simultaneously claim to:
I'm well aware of the jump in Reddit-related traffic, and have commented at length on it.
The fact that HN have now put their thumb on the scale without notifying either submitters or the general readership concerns me greatly.
How about HN:
Hacker News's own credibility is very much at risk here and that itself is a serious concern to the site.
(Communicated to HN's mod team via email, comment here adapted slightly.)
Edit: Fixed link to Reddit admin discussion.
To be honest, I don't think it's that insidious. Quite simply dang just doesn't want Reddit content plastered over the frontpage. It's a reasonable sentiment, and one that many users here have shared about this site.
I honestly don't think they care about whatever "reputation risk" it has. Hackernews uniquely does not have a monetization strategy and never needs to have one. It's tildes if tildes was funded by the pocket change from a very large VC company.
Dang is doing subjective curation as the "benevolent dictator" of hackernews, as he can and has done in the past. It is what it is.
Agreed - there's been several instances of seeing malice where there isn't any lately - either with HN, who are probably just reacting to keep their entire front page from being flooded with reddit stories (kbin and lemmy are struggling with this right now), or with reddit itself, with things like old comments showing up after users delete their profiles (a side effect of the ancient code base, not intentional).
I would also posit that the modmails going out to small, private subs is a side effect and not intended. The most likely scenario is that something was hastily cobbled together to modmail any sub that went private after a certain date, and a lot of subs they don't really care about are getting caught in that net. There's other posts I'm seeing that make me think this isn't the only kludgy script that's been hacked together to help facilitate their latest actions.
Unfortunately, I'd also guess they're going to use the same kind of cobbled together tools for their next steps, up to and including banning the mod accounts, setting the subs to public, and opening them up for requesting. If they do, it's going to get messy. Well, messier.
Edit: yeah, they specifically say they'll remove the penalty once the flood of posts eases. and that they'll remove it for significant news. They just don't want to drown in drama. A very valid position to take imo.
I'm surprised as to how underprepared for this this makes them out to be. I wonder what they thought the backlash would be like.
I'm not. Over the years, we've seen so many reddit features leveraged by bad actors because they were poorly implemented and the consequences weren't thought out.
And in a week, they'll cut off access to the apps a lot of mods use to moderate, while their own app lacks basic moderation features like access to modmail, which may or may not be launched in September.
Edit: A few others...
I'm sure I'm missing some.
I've certainly had my own set of long-standing concerns with Reddit. Mostly discussed in /r/dredmorbius, presently set private.
Amongst those was the concern of Reddit unilaterally seizing control of personal and private subreddits.
spez of all people should know how much of a dopamine rush the internet gets from mass trolling. see: encryption key for dvd's being plastered everywhere
Although it does suck to see the topic you submitted downranked, I think you might be losing perspective and seeing it in a narrow, single-issue way? Getting attention on Hacker News has always been a crapshoot. It's an all-against-all competition and it's fuzzy, not like an objective voting algorithm or sports competition.
It's more like the game master in a tabletop RPG putting their thumb on the scale to make the campaign more interesting. If they don't like what the front page looks like, they'll make adjustments and sometimes your link is collateral damage. Being more explicit and transparent about the rules wouldn't help, it's just going to expose their bag of hacks to more rules-lawyering.
At least in principle, I think the maintainers wanting to cover a diversity of tech news rather than running a fair competition is a good thing. I wouldn't want to see Hacker News turn into Reddit News just because it's what readers are most interested in now. There's other interesting tech news out there that has nothing to do with Reddit.
Also, there are other websites. Reddit news isn't hard to find.
I'm quite familiar with my content being downvoted.
My concern is with HN silently changing the policy, without notice, and in opposition to what is literally "the first rule of HN moderation":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320816
If a YC startup is causing so much heat that they’re generating a lot of trash content on a website, it’s normal that this takes precedence.
Again, what even is the YC stake in Reddit? I doubt it’s significant anymore.
Oh snap that was you? I recognized the top comment and realized I read this a few hrs ago. Honestly idc if API reverts, farming reddit to feed AI algorithms leaves a nasty taste in my mouth. I hope reddit self destructs because the kids on there have no awareness of how nasty it actually is.. it's like if every time you went out in public there was a dude just standing next to every single person there with a microphone recording every word. The ease at which I was able to obtain every reddit comment ever from 2005 to 2023 was kinda disturbing.
edit: btw the archive link to your chat with the admin is broken. Google Cache page
I'm just going to miss using reddit in google searches to get actually helpful information.
I've corrected that link.
I'd long since given up on Reddit as being useful or attractive. What I was hoping was that I could leave my old posts and comments up and have them remain useful, without risking hostile takeover of my subreddit or profile.
Neither now seem possible.
Like stu2b50 said, it’s really not that conspiratorial. Dang is curating. Reddit content is penalised because especially on hn it’s inflammatory, leads to loads of repetitive discussion and not much in terms of new and interesting content.
I think on tildes we have an understanding that a lot of the current active userbase has a special interest in the topic but in this sort of situation we usually create one megathread and don’t allow so many news posts about it either.
Also how much stake does YC even have in Reddit anymore?
Earlier comment: https://tildes.net/~tech/16tb/first_they_came_for_r_pics_now_reddit_are_coming_for_the_individual_personal_subreddits#comment-8s5i
Thanks for adding to the growing body of knowledge about the Reddit situation. When the reddit blackout started I found myself on HN more and didn't even think about the connection. It definitely seems like the narrative they push about penalizing reddit content is, at best, sketchy.
Has there been any reply from HN?
Not yet, and I'll try to update when there is.
Update: Dang has replied here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36443314
I want to iterate that his response is, as almost always, patient, calm, considered, reasoned, and largely defensible. Regarding HN moderation of YC topics, the key word is less, not none, a point well made.
The comment covers most of what I'd addressed in my email (my comment above is adapted from that), and in email he adds the observation that my submission had triggered the flamewar detector, which I can well believe.
Overall I'm reasonably satsified with this. I'm in the midst of composing a reply at HN over other details aspects, mostly clarifying my own understanding of the situation, which I think is reasonably strong and actually supports much of what dang has to say.
Update: And I've now replied on that thread.
Previously:
I usually hear back within anything from a few minutes to a few days, but typically a few hours.
Dang's been active commenting to HN within the past three hours. From other recent discussion, he has a large email queue to work through. (There's a multi-member mod team, but dang is the sole voice so far as I'm aware.) Occasionally more complex discussions can take longer, though in this case I pointedly did make specific suggestions to which HN may choose to apply or reject.
There's generally a good relationship between us, and I've long respected HN's effective, and usually justified, moderation practices. I'm hoping that this is an oversight / exigent situation made with inadequate time for full reflection.
Note: This message is sent in an automated manner. There even have been several people who received it in subs that were never private, weren't private at the time of the message, and didn't even have more than 5 subscribers.
We (the /r/ModCoord community) have been trying to reverse engineer what exactly the criteria were/are but we aren't particularly sure yet, as far as I know.
That said, we received this message in one of my subreddits, and replies were locked. We wrote two essays and I sent it to them via redditmail, and let's just say they weren't very happy to receive them. The only reply we got was "Reopening is still something that should be happening now". And we did not reopen.
What is this talking about with r/pics? What happened?
The Reddit admins came for /r/pics.
They got Sexy John Oliver.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65949412
Ah. I took that statement in the title to suggest something else happened since, like replacing mods with those who will return to the old rules.
Well, /r/pics went All Sexy John Oliver after that threat was made, apparently.
The Subreddits must flow.
Specifically I love how quickly they went from "this isn't affecting us at all. It'll pass." To "whoops, now we have to commandeer every subreddit so it doesn't look like we just killed ourselves."
Reddit should realize what too few platforms ever do before it's too late: Without the people creating the content, You. Are. Nothing.
It doesn't matter if the platform survives if no one uses it. MySpace still exists after all.
Wait, are you really saying the mods are creating anything?
I'm saying that the people who use Reddit create the value of Reddit by creating content. It is my opinion that the administration at Reddit have forgotten this and think they can alienate their users without suffering for it
depends on the sub, but outside of power modding situations, moderators tend to be previously active and regular users. They tend to remain so even as a mod in many communities.
Still, even if they dont: curation is incredibly underrated and moderators are ultimately one half of the curation spectrum that keeps the other side (votes) from going rampant putting meme or stale content at the top.
Heck, go to any subreddit with poor moderation and compare it to any subreddit with good moderation.
There's a reason /r/AskHistorians and similar subreddits have held up and are known as high quality. While part of it is due to the commenters, one wouldn't believe the amount of stuff that has to be pruned for the good stuff to be seen, and to encourage that high quality to be there. Just saying that something should be a space for high quality discussion doesn't work, for some strange reason.
I've got a longstanding beef with /r/AskHistorians for deleting comments mentioning or linking to SciHub or Library Genesis.
That notwithstanding, I respect what they've done with the sub, and the difference between what it is (or was), and what it would have been without them.
Generally speaking, they are providing a moderated setting to post and discuss content. I’ve seen subs with little to no moderation become overrun with porn and other spam (and I don’t mean the malicious compliance kind that’s going on right now). I never go back to those places after seeing that. Mods are also more than likely posting content and engaging in discussion, which is the lifeblood of Reddit, something the vast majority of Reddit users don’t do (they just consume that content as lurkers).
Reddit is very much driven by the small minority that generates its content and moderates.
You're commenting on a thread addressing the specific case of single-user subreddits, in which the sole contributor and the moderator are one and the same. A not-infrequent circumstance, as it happens.
It's fair to say that moderation is an essential service for any online community, in the same ways that sanitation, police, fire, public health, building inspection, and other shared services are essential to physical communities.
Moderation doesn't create the life and interactions of the community, but maintains, protects, and nurtures their continued existence.
I suspect the real story behind the story is that spez isn't nearly as clever as he thinks he is and is caving to pressure from the Angels to monetize. He's always sucked at PR. This time is just more spectacular than usual.
I also suspect that maybe they were trying to seem more mature for that upcoming IPO and maybe it just turned into a power trip. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
He admitted that he was inspired by Elon's Musk. He saw Elon did drastic changes and Twitter users still stick to it and didn't switch to Mastadon. So that's what he counts on and is continuing to double down, because he still believes that number of users that switch to alternatives will be minuscule.
I'd love to see one of those site that tracks paid subs and bots for YouTubers or instagrammers take up the mantle for reddit too, just to get that information out there. Even if the bots are automods or cat facts, it's still important to know.
I'll be honest, I don't know what Pushshift is, nor what many mod tools are, but that makes a lot of sense. Obfuscating data to make themselves look better seems like exactly the kind of thing a company with an impending IPO would do.
I don't know if it's a user count issue for them. It's more likely an advertiser issue. They're desperate to get things back to normal because advertisers are losing confidence in their ad platform as a result of this (that source is an advertiser/marketing trade site). Advertisers are pulling out and refusing to pay for ads on reddit as a result. I saw another trade site article about this a few days after that one with more in depth info but I can't find it now.
But the insane part is that by handling things they way they have, they look even worse to investors and advertisers.
Huffman is drawing inspiration from Musk and sees that it wasn't so bad, but he is forgetting that unlike Musk he isn't actually fully owning the site and he cannot find some cash in his couch to keep the site running during the time it's not profitable because of massive changes. Musk can also afford to not pay bills without having significant consequences.
Musk at least was honest and open about his intentions when he killed third party apps. He didn't pretend to care about 3rd party developers but actually price them out like Reddit is doing.
I have a gut feeling that a large number current admins never used reddit for any meaningful duration. Check the kerfuffle at mildlyinteresting for example.
You'd be right. Ask anyone who's participated in the adopt an admin program - most of the admins who take part have no idea how reddit works and struggle with the most basic tasks.
In a twist on #YourHoldingItWrong, apparently #YouAreTakingItPrivateWrong