68
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Reddit moderators will now have to submit a request to switch their subreddit from public to private
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- Title
- Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible
- Authors
- Jay Peters
- Published
- Sep 30 2024
- Word count
- 747 words
Spez was always a shifty kind of guy, but he is just becoming more of a ________ ( can I swear on Tildes? ) as time goes on.
Moderators also set subreddits to private when they want to shut them down, such as in consolidating several subreddits on the same exact subject.
Don't go on some incoherent rant, but yes. the occasional swear is fine.
On topic: this is a very weird decision. I know they have the blackout in ind as well as a few hostile decisions from history. But the other time subreddits go privatee is when extreme brigading happens and there's just so much mess to cleanup. Something mods are forced to do precisely because admin support it minimmal.
I don't suddenly expect them to be more responsive after this update.
Well there’s always the option of a soft shutdown: Set Automod to delete every new post. That should work fine as a brigade-defence. It’s still a shitty move though.
According to the article you can still limit it to approved posters for up to seven days without an admin request using some new "Temporary Events" feature, which is better than nothing at least.
Though ironically this means it wouldn't actually have stopped the latest wave of protests anyway.
That would be an interesting maneuver, given that the actual protests lasted barely 3 days. Even a week of a better organized protest can do some damage to reddit.
I don't either. I haven't heard about brigading for a long time. Is it still a thing. It seems like Reddit got the redpill and similar reddits under control a while ago.
At the scale Reddit's grown to, you can say Brigades are negligible now. But if you go to those seedy communities targeting the small-midsized subs with only a few mods that can't be 24/7, you'll find plenty of cases. Admins sadly seem to care less now than they did back then though, despite supposedly taking moves to "clean the swamp". You sadly don't need more than a few dozen people to disrupt a 100k sub community.
(ofc I'm putting aside the Dead Internet theory that Reddit has simply become a bunch of bots and paid actors. But may as well mention it)
You can swear on Tildes.
Darn tootin'.
"Mothertrucker dude, that hurt like a butcheek on a stick"
Watch yo profamity
Someone told me in a private conversation that some guy who came over from Reddit got banned within a few days for swearing. He referred to some non-protected group with a curse word slang.
If this was the case posted about on r/RedditAlternatives about a year ago, here's Deimos' take on the matter.
Thank you.
The person I had that private conversation with had sent me that link.
If you're not calling people names, or slurs, regardless of if they're "protected" (I don't understand this) you can curse. At least I fuckin do all the time.
Presumably the "protected" bit is referring to the concept of a "protected class" in US law, which defines groups that you (in theory at least) aren't allowed to discriminate against in things like hiring and housing. Slurs against those classes tend to be part of the definition of hate speech in some places and thus to be more heavily moderated on most sites.
That said, Tildes isn't most sites, and I see no reason why Deimos should decide not to ban someone who's being an incredibly disruptive flaming asshole because they're being an asshole to a broader group of people rather than referring to a specific group of marginalized people.
I considered that but it doesn't make sense as a distinction in the case of a forum not even hosted in the US. ┐(´ー｀)┌
I don't disagree but Americans do have an unfortunate tendency to see ourselves as the center of everything.
The Reddit thing really is quite funny.
It is their platform. They can do what they want on it. And obviously they want good enough content so people actually visit.
On the other hand, all that work is done by unpaid moderators, and the more you drive them away, the more of a mess it becomes.
I don't know if reddit will ever truly "die" in the literal sense (remember, Digg is technically accessible. In a Ships of Thesus kind of way). But I do wonder how far mods are pushed before the savvy ones start to cultivate a true competitor.
That's kind of what happened with Lemmy, but the communities that formed got really really insular and radicalized off one another. If you're marketing to people having migrated off Reddit, you're going to have people dissatisfied with the norm, for better or worse.
Yeah, I can't deny that either. Reddit's controversies are the best time to get an influx of users, but users of the worst kind. see: Voat.
This quote always rings in my mind when those kinds of controversies spur:
It sucks, but it's nearly impossible to target the silent majority who will genuinely help foster a community in a non-radical way. By design of such controversy you're attracting the empassioned, or better or worse.
From all I've seen, you can really only control this with very strong moderation. Ensuring your place is friendly but also not a free-for-all (which ofc such radical users will see as hypocritical).
Hah, that's a great quote. And I completely agree with your latter argument. What brought me to tildes wasn't "reddit sucks go here instead for free speech," it was "hey if you mourn the loss of thoughtful discourse, there's some on this website over here." The latter is the MUCH better way to go.
Is that from Slate Star Codex? That sounds a lot like something he'd write. I lost track of that blog after he moved to Substack.
Yes it’s him. Probably one of his most salient points.
Indeed. From this story. I'd be lying if I aligned with hit POV more than half the time, but his stories are always an interesting read. That quote in particular helped me understand some issues I was seeing around social media and a nasty side effect of why it can be so hard to "just make a competitor, websites are easy". It's not just about how many people you get, but the direction of the discussion.
I lost track of a lot of people over the pandemic (on and offline). I thought he simply stopped posting but had no idea he moved to substack.
Ah, man, I miss him. Thank you for the article!
I have browsed his substack but the content there just isn’t what it was. Lots of open threads and book reviews which are okay but not what I came for.
He’s absolutely influenced how I see the world. Oddly, I was introduced to the blog at a libertarian event and I’m so endlessly thankful that he gave me good solid reasons to dislike libertarianism because I totally could not put it into words by myself.
The problem I see with Lemmy is that I'm unconvinced that the problem is a technical one, it's more an organisational one; in my mind the "best" competitor is something like Tildes or https://ao3.org – a non-profit entity running a web service for the community.
I did not try hard, but I never found the same amount and kind of conversations on Lemmy as I did on Reddit. Your comment makes me glad I did not try harder. I remember the cesspools that were on Voat.co
Reddit seems to have done fine lately. There are enough people willing to do it for free.
Though I have noticed that most reports actually get handled by paid moderators from Reddit. Anything related to hate/harrassment/illegal content goes to paid Reddit staff, while sub mods seem to be mostly there to maintain content quality and character now.
I don't know if I'd agree with that, at least on the subreddits I help moderate. We do report spam and ban evasion to the admins, but it still goes through us first and we usually have to take action while we wait for a response (though the automatic spam filters have been getting better lately). Pretty much everything else we handle entirely ourselves.
Though I think I may not be understanding the distinction you're drawing between "content quality and character" and other types of content moderation.
I think its gotten completely trash in the last 5~ years. At least 60% of the top posts on /r/All are AI generated nonsense stolen clips, posted by karma farming bots.
Will people still go to reddit? Sure; but its no longer a place where you can get an expectation of unique and original content like it used to be. Remember the days when "repost" used to be a common callout? I can't imagine anyone cares about those anymore, let alone stolen freebooted content.
Does it? They seem to be doing alright. Older mods left in disgust, but newer ones took their place. The character of some subreddits changed, but not always for the worst. An example would be /r/politics. I read it for years and I thought the moderation was way too strict with applying rules for new threads. A bunch of those mods left and the moderation seismically shifted in the opposite direction, allowing more links as new threads. A little too much in my opinion, but the subreddit is more pleasant to use.
To be fair, anything you can say about Reddit is true depending on which subreddits you read.
Most of the stuff I see on r/all is pretty unmoderated. InterestingAsFuck, MindblowingThings, etc. now have all sorts of political or inapplicable garbage that I don’t recall was there before.
I use RES to tag people on there, and the number of bots and 3-6 year old posts with timestamps still visible, horrendously degraded jpegs, and ragebait trimmed of context was by the end of a week nearly 40% of /r/all. I still want to get off reddit, but there really isn't a better source for memes for me, so I've gone back to insta-blocking every repost/bot, and subbing to small communities only.
I hit the maximum number of filtered subreddits for /r/all and had to start doing additional filtering with RES. Starting to think there's no realistic way to have the /r/all experience I want without constant pruning.
For memes, there are other good sources but the meme culture has been largely taken over by algorithmic ad-mongers. Even for other places like niche Discords, the meme content is likely spillover content from those sites, though the hand curation is nice
Can I ask why you use all like that instead of subbing to the things you want to see?
I don't think I ever clicked on all in my life
I do both. My home page is relatively well behaved, but I occasionally venture beyond to see what's going on more widely, but plenty of subs are not worth a second look at
I don't know enough about your use-case to make a recommendation beyond what you're already doing, but do you use /r/popular and do you region-restrict it as a means of filtering? How does that browsing experience compare, quality-wise, with your version of a filtered /r/all?
I found the language of the announcement somewhat Orwellian. It was implied that by setting subreddits to private we are hurting redditors. It’s not hurting anyone, arguably they are the ones that hurt blind redditors by banning their only way of accessing the site (at the time). There were a couple other weird phrases in there, all in all a very disingenuous and thankless decision.
Privatizing a subreddit can absolutely hurt. That's why it's an effective way to protest.
But is there malice behind this act towards redditors? Nah. Maybe towards Reddit itself but that's not what they're talking about right?
It doesn’t hurt redditors, it’s aimed at Reddit Inc. I don’t like how the admins are generating this story that the policy is meant to protect redditors from getting hurt by moderators. That disingenuous.
Unfortunately, during those protests, there were a lot of reddit users who took this perspective. They felt harmed by the blackouts because they wanted content and did not care about the larger issue or goal. This is basically who Reddit Inc. is catering to. They don't want the principled, savvy redditors of 2012-2018, who were wary of being used and abused. They want the dopamine-seekers who just want to scroll and scroll and scroll.
I agree with you, the language they are using is at best a subtle attempt to appeal to the reader's sensibilities. If we are all being completely honest here, the people being hurt by subreddits being set to private are the shareholders. For over a year now everything done by Reddit was in the interest of IPO, and now that it has happened everything they do is in the interest of instilling value for the shareholders.
Reading between the lines a little bit, I am also half expecting them to make some announcement in the coming weeks that will lead to another round of protests.
If they want to exert this level of control over the unpaid volunteers that make their site the (arguable) success that it is, then they should be damn well paying them.
I think at some point they tried some sort of crypto thing for compensation, but no idea what became of that.
The crypto thing was floated a long time ago as a semi-viable concept for adding real value to a Reddit Gold-like product. Aside from the concerns of making "likes" transactional, I think whichever lawyers Spez tasked with figuring out the viability of the scheme came back with "we'd need to talk with financial attorneys because this is new territory." Then they talked with attorneys familiar with financial regulations and got laughed at. And letting mods get a share of revenue of a Reddit Gold-like product was not much different than making them members of a not-for-profit or shareholders.
On the topic of shareholders, I was very much not pleased with Reddit becoming a publicly traded company. It could've stayed private and become profitable (but that wouldn't have materially impacted Spez's wealth, or provided any money to the early investors who'd been involved for 10 years and had nothing to show for it - Snoop Dogg and Peter Thiel, in the one time those two people should be in the same sentence). But I do think it was an intentional kindness that Reddit provided a direct offering to select users, and basically anyone who was a veteran moderator, allowing them to buy shares at the pro-rated IPO price. While it was of course advantageous to Reddit to get capital directly from the people who had already invested time (and what is time, if not money), they didn't have to do it and the IPO became over-subscribed anyway, suggesting that demand for the stock outweighed the supply. It may have come from a completely different place and for completely different reasons, but I did think about the Reddit crypto idea when the IPO and direct share program was announced.
Is it possible for subreddits to start out as private or NSFW from the start? I am a member of a private subreddit that is invite-only expressly to prevent brigading, and last I checked the "New Reddit" interface does not give users the option to request an invite.
I believe so, yes. You can read their full announcement here (Old Reddit link if you prefer) and they have a TLDR bullet-list. I'm not sure about the invite requests on Shreddit, but I think there have been some reported issues about that recently, so I would keep an eye out for similar complaints and/or solutions in the near future.
My understanding is that this "Community Types" feature is to prevent larger, active communities from flipping back and forth between settings, but if you start a certain way, that's the way you should stay (and for once the admins have thought through this enough to foresee that this should not impact very new or very small communities).
While people are using this as an opportunity to express that it's a measure to control a subreddit's ability to "close" as a form of protest, subreddits already haven't been allowed to close for extended periods of time since the big blackout over third-party apps. And yes, mod teams were forcibly removed by Reddit admins at that time. So this is just codifying that measure. But I do appreciate that the veteran mods are speaking up about the historical relevance of this since a lot of the newer mods are too quick to drink the koolaid.