31
votes
Reddit is about to delete a lot of subreddits based on post activity metrics
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- Creating new opportunities for future community builders
- Authors
- singmethesong
- Word count
- 1008 words
What a bass ackwards way to do this. If they think this is a desirable feature, why not just restrict starting subreddits with blacklisted terms instead of preserving the kludgy workaround the community had to come up with to achieve it?
Yes, I'm so confused. Instead of letting "good samaritans" keep a sub, just ban it if you're worried about abuse. They've already done that in the past for some subs, regardless of how civil they really were. Why not now? They have that power unlike the "helpful redditors" that can only "call dibs".
Two benefits I can see.
The more "useful" to everyone else is agility. This is a much more agile way to block potentially troublesome names. Internet lingo moves fast, things can be wrapped in layers of references and indirection and innocuous enough names can be dogwhistles for much more devious things. Community members deep into the rabbit hole will inevitably have a much better sense for this than reddit admins.
The second feature, mostly useful to Reddit itself, is that it passes the buck. Banning names usually gets the libre peach people riled up, you can make mistakes, etc. and now all that responsibility belongs to the person sitting on the sub name.
I am not sure how interesting this is for anyone on tildes but I figured I'd post it here anyway. If only because some people might still have a personal/private subreddit in use for whatever reason that is now going to be removed. For example any mod using toolbox and has backed up their settings or used the personal notes feature could lose that data.
The title of the post on /r/modnews is of course a very positive one.
And "jokingly" starts with
Which I think is a bit ironic considering how little thought they seem to have put in edge cases where people actively use subreddits just not as a community itself. I can't help but feel like they have a growth metric to work towards for the creation of new subreddits and that they didn't want to consider too many edge cases because that would complicate things to much.
edit:
To be clear, the majority of the subreddits they want to delete probably are dead and never have seen much use so making those available isn't a bad thing. I just think they didn't really invest time to properly consider edge cases. For example, not taking wiki usage in account at all is a rather obvious one to me and might even be the biggest edge case out there.
I don't own any subreddits of any consequence, or moderate any, but it appears there's a decent level of thought put into it.
In particular this one criteria:
would seem to cover a lot of cases
That is only true for phase 2 not for phase 1 so anyone who made a subreddit specifically for other use cases (like testing things, just using the wiki system, etc) is out of luck unless the subreddit name matches their username.
In addition to that, they specifically state the creator of the subreddit and when asked for clarification if they meant top mod they said that they really mean the person that originally created the subreddit. So any reddit requested subreddit or subreddit inherited from someone else is at risk here.
They did cover the most obvious cases that is true. But for over a decade people have been free to use subreddits in whatever way they saw fit so there likely are a lot more novel use cases falling on the wayside here.
But in phase 1 only subreddits with no posts ever will be removed, so most test subreddits should be safe since I imagine many people have used them to test a post or needed to post something to test mod tools on.
I do find it weird that they for some reason can't address a lot of these edge cases when the limits can be identified so quickly and clearly, as shown by people in that thread doing just that. It's just database queries, right?
Not all the edge cases will be that obvious but some of the ones they didn't address like the wiki being in use for something else seem rather obvious to me. Not sure why it wasn't brought up in the "mod council" but then again they never have been clear who is in the council and how many people...
Issue with that is it only applies to the original creator of the sub. I have several subs that I took over that were abandoned by the original creator because they deleted their account.
Another bad decision this week by the admins and their anonymous, hand picked, echo chamber "mod council". The other being new censorship tools.
The Mod council is just a thing they mention to rubber-stamp stuff to make it seem like people have been heard.
In reality, the council doesn't even have a rubber stamp. Their input almost never changes anything significant or make admin take a step back to rethink a bad idea.
In addition to that from what I understand it isn't the same group but picked people depending on what they need feedback on. Which will only introduce a bit of a bias I can imagine.
It's the same group. They pick a sub-group from the Mod council subreddit for each "call" or topic they do.
Considering previous announcements where they mentioned the mod council they either are really rubber stamping it or the group itself is lacking people that are able to be critical and have the broad experience with a variety of reddit related things to point out some of the obvious issues....
The more time I spend on reddit, the more I'm convinced that the site will eventually fall apart.
Reddit is being driven to the ground by a cabal of power users. Unlike with Digg though, these users have the power to actually remove posts, remove comments, ban users and (through their connections with Reddit staff themselves) can complain loudly enough until the admins swoop in and outright ban communities they don't like. Despite Reddit having moderator guidelines for healthy communities that should curb this stuff, they've only ever used said guidelines to rein in right wing subreddits that go against their own ideologies.
If we interpreted the mod guidelines literally, many major subreddits would have needed admin intervention. The fact that you're more likely to be modmail muted by one of their power-tripping internet janitors than to be given a serious ban appeal (which is required as per the site's mod guidelines) is bonkers.
The only reason that Reddit is still alive is due to angry internet mobs preventing any competitor from gaining traction.
At the moment with any social media competitor that try to take Reddit or Twitter on, the problematic exiles from these sites often flock to it, push the platform's more liberal open speech policies to their limits and then drive the angry mob to mailbomb their stakeholders to stop doing business with the company. This is what happened to Voat, what happened to Poal, what happened to Gab, what happened to Parler, and what is currently happening to Ruqqus (Patreon stopped doing business with them, and they're currently dependent on Paypal to take premium subscription payments, which will surely end soon once they discover what Ruqqus's user base are like...)
I think for any Reddit competitor to become big, they either need to find a way to stay afloat after most advertisers, payment processors and web hosts have cancelled them, OR they need to have clear and concise rules against hate speech that are enforced to prevent themselves from becoming another Stormfront.
The former surely can't be too hard, right? I mean the Pirate Bay has stood for decades without the help of cryptocurrencies despite no legitimate business on this planet wanting to fund piracy...
Why would they do this? /r/RedditRequest exists for a reason.
This only seems like a bad move.
My guess is that /r/RedditRequest requires them to do actual work.