Is how easily mods have caved in once the admins threatened to remove them. I had thought we’d see quite a few cases where Reddit would have to step in an replace entire mod teams (effectively killing the community). But it seems like that hasn’t happened at all - the closest we’ve got is mods being reordered.
I guess I didn’t appreciate how much moderating means to some people, especially people who are marginalised or otherwise have shitty lives… (which makes Reddit’s behaviour even more abhorrent! Exploiting the most vulnerable in society to provide free labour they are making huge profits off).
That said, it seems like Reddit has crossed the Rubicon now. They have now forced mods to run their subreddits in a certain way. Mods now know they are operating in some tight boundaries, and the admins can - on a whim - change the rules and force them to comply. i.e. any illusion of the power they had is now massively reduced. I’m sure a lot of them will be in denial, but this more than likely won’t be the last time we see this happen.
Tbh, on my mod account, I’m staying just inside where they’ll try to something. Not so that I don’t get removed, but to drag things out as long as possible. In the meanwhile, I’m dismantling and changing the automod little bits at a time, making small deletions of popular posts, etc so that when they inevitably catch on, whatever scab they throw in has to work harder than I did to set it up.
Fuck spez, and fuck reddit.
Fighting the good fight.
This was bound to happen. As long as someone at reddit could override the mods, there’s no way the subs could stay private indefinitely. At least not without the entire community in agreement.
The goal is to make sure all this drama stays public so everyone sees how pissed everyone is and investors see reddit as the sinking ship it is.
Yeah, we always knew Reddit had the power to end the protests overnight if they wanted to. I just thought they would have to exercise more of that power directly rather than just threaten to do so.
Well, consider how some subs have changed to be about John Oliver. Many who stayed are still trying to fight the good fight for us.
But it’s up to us to build good communities here, so when reddit inevitably flexes its muscle and starts steamrolling, those mods will have a place to flee to. The best way to help the mods out now is to build a good alternative for them.
Yeah true, there’s some malicious compliance going on. But in some cases the admins seem to have also told mods they have to “operate normally”, i.e. telling them not only do they have to open up, but that they have to moderate in a certain way.
Ouch. Totally believable, unfortunately. But then again, who defines normal?
Would be interested to hear more specifics, as this is the first I’ve heard about “normal”
An r/Steam mod saying they were told they had to return to “normalcy”: https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/14bvwe1/comment/johskj2/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
I guess that could just mean “open up”. But I suspect Reddit is just focussed on forcing subs to come out of private for now. Once they’ve done that, they’ll force them to start moderating “in good faith” or whatever phrase they want to use to make mods behave in a certain way.
r/Steam is cracking me up with their malicious compliance. Their front page right now is filled with posts about actual steam.
Outrageous what reddit admins are doing, but not unexpected.
Is steams mod team part of the corporate hierarchy as many brand subreddits are?
If so, we might not be getting the full picture because I can’t imagine they are behaving this way with companies who are otherwise considered brand partners.
Not as far as I know… but don’t know for sure.
Moderations who weren’t cowards got their subreddits quarantined/banned. Only Mods who agree with the admins politics or are too weak-willed to resist remain.
Nah, there are still a lot protesting, they just know that if they don’t do things a certain way they’ll be replaced with bootlickers. Pics, gifs, aww, interestingasfuck, iOS, wellthatsucks- all are bringing attention to the admin’s bullshit while technically doing as admins asked.
In some cases, it’s more complex than that. e.g. see this very interesting post by the r/LegalAdviceUK mods: https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/14cr5zc/were_back_and_heres_whats_happening/
I get where they’re coming from, kind of. If they’re going to make another move in the future, they need to still be moderators of the subreddit or no one will pay attention.
But they need to realize that 99.9% of people will only hear about their actions, not their reasons. And their action has been to surrender to the admins’ demands and return to normal operations. They’ve contributed to the growing narrative that the protest has failed, which puts more pressure on the remaining holdouts to fold.
A couple news stories of moderators of prominent subreddits being forcibly removed by reddit would have been a thousand times more effective than these vague promises of future actions that might never happen.
Many mod teams are biding their time while they make plans in private, so that’s also something to consider.
They had better be. The mods at the larger subreddits clearly aren’t safe as long as Reddit is this profit-driven. If it helps their bottom line, they will step in and reorganize mod teams one at a time.
Part of the problem as we’ve seen with a few subreddits is all it takes is one mod who is swayed to reddits side to end the blackouts and probably will happen with these protests that have been happening as well. One mod that either doesn’t support the blackouts or says they don’t but really is just using it to gain full control of the subreddit is all it takes.
Yeah, which in the long run is a recipe for disaster… putting the most power hungry mods in charge
Yes, it’s inevitable but stretching out the pain to draw more people to the fediverse is useful. The more news it makes, the more people will want to check it out, and a wee bit of viral, newsworthy drama could make a significant impact on the adoption trajectory. Plus, for petty people like me, it’s a great source of entertainment.
Prisoners dilemma, do all the mods trust all the mods to not defect? Because it only takes one.
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Change doesn’t happen overnight. As long as the shitshow continues, it’ll affect Reddit. Plenty of mods still protesting, and many are contemplating their next moves.
I personally am thinking of stepping down, I haven’t done much moderation in the past year or so anyway.
I expect another exodus when the apps shut down at the end of the month as well. Things happen in stages.
Just change the rules of the sub to include NSFW and then set the whole sub to NSFW. Reddit doesn’t advertise on NSFW subreddits, so the sub is open, but you impact reddit’s bottom line.
The Toyota subreddit did that earlier today and then it went private. I don’t know if Reddit turned it private to clean it up or if the moderators did.
That would make no sense, right? I mean I could get it if the admins put it private, but not with that specific message:
The sub is closed indefinitely and will not reopen.
Unless it was never changed, I guess.
It’s still an odd response if it’s admins.
- Set your sub to private: Now you get told to open it.
- Set your sub to NSFW: Now it gets set to private.
Seems contradictory. Not that that’s a reason for it not to be true of course.
if you acknowledge that abortion ends a life, or that abortion is commonly used as a form of birth control, (two objectively true statements)
Yikes. Those are absolutely not objectively true.
You might even say objectively false.
If moderators were paid, and Reddit wasn’t simply monetizing the community’s content and goodwill, it wouldn’t be too hard to see the company’s coercive tactics as akin to strike-busting.
As it is, their behaviour seems to have accelerated the movement towards federated and open social media. Win.
It’s exactly equivalent.
Several of the big subs have switched to a malicious compliance though where they’ve reopened but are nothing like their normal content. It’s not actually against the rules, and seems kind of clever unless I’m missing something?
Only thing I have to say to that is that this form of protest still brings activity to Reddit which means ad money in spez‘s pocket. It‘s as if the workers during a strike still go to work and produce the things that makes the company money, but painted pink or something, so people still buy it (maybe even more cause that is unusual) and spend. No strikes would be effective if that is how they went, which is why usually the workers withdraw their labor entirely.
That said, it‘s not a job, the mods can do what they want with it and I can do what I want too, which is not give views and build community here.
Nah, I think you’ve got this all wrong. Nobody’s going to Reddit for pics of John Oliver. What this does is render the larger subs effectively useless. A more apt metaphor would be a sandwich shop doing only one, fairly unappealing (sorry John) style of sandwich. People are going to stop coming in right quick.
These mods are still fighting and I applaud them. Reddit might be a flawed model but I am ALWAYS down for frustrating the aims of people like spez.
I guess I didn’t appreciate how much moderating means to some people people, especially people who are marginalised or otherwise have shitty lives…
You hit the nail in the head. I suspect that the mod protest is not about the stupid surcharges on third party API users, but a combination of:
- Native Reddit app not offering any type of meaningful tooling so that mods can be effective at moderating content (this is the main one - if reddit always had good tooling for mods, I bet the mod community wouldn’t care less for third party viewers)
- Massive greed on Reddits part, by not offering compromise solutions (like offering free API usage to subscribes who pay some $2 per month and shifting the cost to users)
- Reddit technical inability to push ads via API (just force adds through API and make the terms and conditions such that filtering ads become a.violation of API)
My reason for taking part is the fact that the cheap fuck, spez, wants to sell our content, place ads on seeing the content, mine tracking data to sell more ads, but only let us do it on the app that’s the most invasive, least developed, buggiest possible heap of shit that’s available for reddit.
He does all of that while crowing about reddit’s corpus of data, wanting to lock nsfw content to the official dumpster fire of an app so he can be a cyberpimp, and then repeatedly refusing to admit that he does nothing useful for the company that the mods and users actually keep going.
Fuck spez.
The api pricing is just the head of the zit. He’s the pus inside.
Agreed. Unfortunately on my local sub (just a bit over 250k users) the mods are the ones trying to push for continued protest through malicious compliance. Most users are completely clueless and find the protest cringe and useless. I’ve gone back twice since the blackout, only to voice my opinions and it was not well received. A lot of people just don’t see a problem with having the platform getting revenue off their own content. I don’t think I’ll ever go back to Reddit and will most likely delete my account after 12 years.
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This reddit lies person is pro-forced birth?? wtf???
yeah that twitter thread was mostly a shit show and not the crowd I want to have around
In a group of mods theres bound to be different kinds of people. Reddit has demodded people like on r/piracy but i guess it only takes 1 mod willing to take over…
Because calling internet moderation “unpaid work” is intellectually dishonest. It’s a hobby, at best. They know they’re getting paid, just not with money. They get paid in the only currency they actually care about: arbitrary internet police power. Whats funny is most of them probably hate actual police for their arbitrary abuses of power. As soon as admins threatened to “fire” them they largely fell in line because they know for each degenerate power tripping reddit mod, theres 100 degenerate lurkers who would happily replace them. They are fully aware of that fact, and that’s why threatening to remove them worked.
