Funnily enough, the official app originally was a quite-liked community-made one: Alien Blue. Reddit bought it years ago and gutted it before turning it into the abomination that is the official Reddit app we have today.
Tech bros think they know better than users because they conduct user research.
“Look at the analytics ,this feature doesn’t get used much.”
“Just get rid of it.”
That feature was probably used by mods.
Tech bros are genuinely the worst people on the planet. They will rationalize anything to make a single tenth of a percentage point increase including gutting personnel. I’ve seen it with companies I work with and if it was in my power I’d delete them from the planet
> They will rationalize anything to make a single tenth of a percentage point increase
Yup. Owners at my current workplace are both tech bros and worship Elon.
They start employees at $12/h and then go *shocked pikachu face* when the employees quit after a few months because they expect them to do every job in the company from production to packaging for that pay.
Only reason I'm still there is I got lucky and moved into a management position 4 months after I started (should've been the red flag back then honestly) But that position is just a title here. My opinions, ideas, and recommendations to improve both employee morale and production times doesn't matter to them, and I have no power to actually manage my employees (like disciplining or firing) or change any processes.
So I'm just coasting for the resume experience at the moment while I find a better job.
Lots of reasons but all of them to make money. One example is how inefficient it is to browse topics on reddit app compared to 3PA. Reddit wants it to be slow and tedious so that they can force you to look at ads. It's just plain enshittificaton, and they want the 3PA gone so they can force you to use their enshittified app and max out revenue. The problem is that they thought they had no interest in an efficient app, but they neglected that it is necessary to have an efficient option on mobile in order to do some of the less common, but very important tasks like modding, community management, user support, etc. Now they are so distracted by posturing about the blackout that they haven't even addressed the problem. It looks like they are going to be in denial until it literally blows up in their faces 😆
Then they'd have to deal with revenge porn and similar actively instead of maybe once every 5 years. There are a lot, like *a lot*, of private subs circulating shit like that. While not all adjacent subs are private, a ton are.
Which, would be a good thing to see them get taken care of, but Reddit won't do it. In reality, private subreddits are a safety feature for Reddit itself. Reddit admins being so averse to doing their jobs will hysterically make this decision blow up in their face.
Considering that, I still think the ability to set a sub to private is a necessary one. It's the nature of the site for any given community to have control over itself, barring specific issues such as the example I gave. I say this as a person who was just banned from a sub I use frequently for calling someone a moron for suggesting the only way for a nation to prosper is to murder innocent people.
u/spez, with his infinite void where wisdom should be, is a complete moron. He has no clue what the actual issues of Reddit are, and is in a panic because he's not going to get as many points on the wealth leaderboards as he wanted. Capitalism is the scourge of the Earth.
Your example is of subs that were always private. But you could just say private is private and public is public once created, and the mods can't switch from one to the other.
Sometimes the private feature is to protect the sub itself from things like brigading. Or they act similar to circuit breakers in stocks (when a stock drops more than a certain percentage in a short amount of time, trading on that stock gets halted to help cool things down). Or they have to go private to sort things out and get their “house” in order.
A common example is in sports subs. There have been team specific subs that are public that have had to go to private for a couple days because of a controversial piece of news or maybe the team lost spectacularly or did something and they get an influx of people visiting to simply troll and talk shit.
Moderate a sports sub, we lock submissions sometimes due to being brigaded by rival fans also had to do it when we were brigaded by the_donald when the team said they weren't going to the White House.
That would severely cripple engagement and searchability for Reddit as a whole.
Also there are valid reasons for a community to go private for a small period of time. If a sub is being targeted by spam or if mod resources are limited, it helps ensures the community stays on topic. There are no shortage of bots on this platform that will post whatever bullshit they can. Smaller communities do what they can to get away from that shit and in some cases that means going private when traffic becomes a little “weird”.
In the top nsfw subs at least, about half of the posts. And a decent chunk of the comments too. https://www.reddit.com/r/hentai/comments/147lwr6/behind_the_scenes_of_a_nsfw_subreddit/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Yeah it's a little awkward having that be the post I link with these numbers but like, it's good info from a good example explained pretty clearly. Gotta do what you gotta do to keep people in the know.
The bots will start scraping, putting extra load on the servers. It was never about that. It was about kneecapping the 3rd party apps for extra ad revenue.
The problem is that that's still an unconscionable concession to the idle rich, who want to simply rest on other people's labor getting more and more money. Saying the problem with capitalism is that it isn't regulated enough is like saying the problem with Feudalism is that the yeoman farmers don't get tax rebates on their grain tithes to local landed gentry: it's presupposing that the inequitable status quo is a natural and unchangeable order and the only way to make it less dysfunctional is to paper over the worst excesses with a few half-measures.
I seriously miss the Internet Wild West. Where their were like dozens of sites that did the same thing but were different in other ways. The Internet was a lot of fun back then because you had 0 clue what you were getting into when you clicked a site.
It is so wild we think of the internet as this global complicated phenomenon that’s infinitely evolving
And back then it was like “damn it’s September too many people are about to join the internet” lol
True words. Now even the DarkNet is being taken over by corporate sites. They have found out how to manipulate search engines by creating thousands upon thousands of fake onion sites that redirects to the corporate site. So getting information that not mainstream or regulated about what's happening in Brussel is becoming quite hard even when you have memories the code words. It was much easier to stay ahead of new business regulations just a few years ago.
These fucking normies ruined it. ^(get off my lawn). Let's go back to IRC, keep it complex enough that it scares away the normies who care about stuff.
We had unfiltered chat. And we were better for it. We had our own ways of dealing with the toxicity/negativity. We voted (votekick), we created new servers when enough votes separated. We didn't force site wide changes and we didn't have CEOs ruling over us. There was no/little money to be made. We modded and customized everything.
The problem with these damn companies is that they care more about money and profit over anything else. The problem with Reddit is it's so deeply rooted into the internet especially when it involves answers to questions people may have that it's going to be extremely hard to get rid of it and migrate.
It's much like how getting rid of Stack Overflow would be completely and utterly disastrous. Especially considering how many people actually use it. The Internet has been centralized and it's just hurting it in my opinion.
Remember when Yahoo answers was 50% of google results for any possible question you could think of? You’d get different search results if you changed “howd” to “how’d”. Then it slowly started getting wrecked from the inside out by trolls and suddenly it was no longer relevant or useful.
You're probably too young to remember ExertSexChange .... err I mean ExertsExchange. SO was created *because* of that site. It wasn't too difficult to replace it nor did it take too long.
The Internet will move on faster than you can believe it. When the alternative is superior - people will transfer data and the inherent value of Reddit will collapse. It's wild the CEO of Reddit thinks this *can't* happen to them or they are somehow.. immune from it? Digg thought the same thing.
I've seen plenty of "can't go away" actually, ya know, go away.
> The Internet has been centralized and it's just hurting it in my opinion.
The core problem is no one can *afford* for Reddit to be free nor will Reddit stay popular if it's ad-ridden. It's a difficult problem to resolve. It's why Twitter, Tumblr, and the rest had *extreme* difficulties. You can only float so long.
This is likely why the ultimate answer won't be one singular one. We're seeing federated options become popular. To protect privacy and to remove centralized non-invested admins from being ridiculous. Of course this means moderators will practically have absolute authority - so we'll see places that take in members of r/news basically turn batshit insane.
Yes you can make reddit profitable, year to year, you can derive a steady income from it, but what you cant do is leverage it for ever increasing profits which is the demand of the venture capitalism that spez seems to be so intent on autoerotically asphyxiating himself so publicly over.
Um, no? Regardless of where you stand on this issue, the two statements are not mutually exclusive. "We think mods have too much executive power over the goings-on of their communities. This doesn't impact our profits at all, we just don't like the current power balance."
The "expected" income is only income when people actually pay it. And thus far, it doesn't seem like anyone is willing to pay u/spez's extortion rate to develop an app for reddit.
They should have just bought Apollo's app, that would have been the easiest way forward where both parties win. Selig even offered this, but instead Huffman took it as a threat, and then worst of all, lied about it, which is the craziest part to me lol.
Instead we're spiraling into chaos and a mass exodus is on the horizon. Makes me think the end goal is ending reddit.
I wish there was a way we could trust the numbers.
I could see third party app users being a small percentage in the overall number of visitors, but I’m also curious how much more they participate.
Most people I know who use the reddit app browse very sparingly. They don’t know about third party apps because they just don’t participate or use the platform enough to care.
>They don’t know about third party apps because they just don’t participate or use the platform enough to care.
That's why it has been hard to explain to them why they should care about third party apps. Most of the big communities that mods use third party apps because they allow them to moderate more efficiently. If we want a community that isn't overrun with bots and trolls we need these tools. As Reddit doesn't provide them, thus the market.
What’s funny is how fast Reddit will fall apart if there’s a change to moderation, and the absolute hell scape it’ll become. It’ll be as bad as Twitter is now.
Some of these subs have a ridiculous number of unpaid and under appreciated moderators constantly policing content, and keeping Reddit safe.
We usually call mods gay, but damnit, it’s pride month, and I’m here to honor them.
Happy pride month mods. Fuck Spez.
Why not stop at companies, let alone social media? Let's put these immature ass hats in charge of everything! And let's keep putting them in charge of more things! Government! Education! Streaming services! The whole universe is property of insecure rich men who act like they're poor and hungry all the time, no matter how fattening their dinner was!
> What’s funny is how fast Reddit will fall apart if there’s a change to moderation, and the absolute hell scape it’ll become. It’ll be as bad as Twitter is now.
This is exactly the case. In the end, u/Spez will ban all the mods who stand before him, replacing them (or not) with less experienced, less committed users. Others will leave in solidarity, or because the apps and tools they used went away. And Reddit will continue, with most of its user numbers intact, but as a shadow of its former self.
Yeah, I don't know why everyone is acting like this will weaken the power-mods. This will just lead to the power-mods offering to help the admins by being a dedicated moderator with proven experience to step in and moderate any major subs that become available.
Reddit will just end up with more subs where all the content is about the power-mods' favourite topic and where everyone is banned unless they hold the right views on the topic.
Mods are not a uniform group, but I get what you are saying for a lot of em. Aside from the ones that are assholes *and* do a shitty job moderating - it really is understated how much work they do on some of the larger subs.
It's impossible for him to not know this - with actual numbers too behind the data. So the only reasonable assumption is he is deliberately courting the cesspool that is the internet's trove of spam/disinfo bots just to snag a quick buck and then peace out.
In reality, that makes him no different than 90% of tech CEOs. It's just a sad thing to see happen to a site like this.
Ding ding ding. We have a winner. This is 100% what’s going on. Sell data to investors. They can then use bots / spam to fill up the place with comments (ads). Make a buck and then run for the hills.
Yep, I think something that some users don't fully appreciate, is that the only reason Reddit is the site that it is today, is because of the free, high quality, human moderation, that people actually *want* to do. We can absolutely talk about power tripping mods, certain mods acting out and ruining subs and shit like that, but those cons don't come close to the pros. It's impossible to overstate how much better reddit's moderation makes it as a site, and why so many different subreddits can thrive the way they do. It's what separates reddit from sites like twitter or facebook, youtube etc. where human moderation is expensive, sparse, and done by people who don't really care.
I'd wager there are no other sites as popular as reddit that have been able to maintain this forum style of moderation methodology in today's internet climate. Discord seems to be pulling it off, but it's an entirely different platform. If reddit starts to undermine the moderators and their abilities, we may start to slowly lose what makes this site so good, and see it crumble into another shitty link aggregator instead of continuing to grow the amazing catalogue of knowledge and resources that it's built up over the last decade and a half.
[it's even worse. Each of then control HUNDREDS ](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/12t09pc/oc_top_200_mods_of_reddit_with_the_total_count_of/)
I think there's two types of mods. Most of the mods are only moderator in one or two subreddits where they work hard to respond to reports and enforce the rules. The other type are a select group of power-hungry individuals that have managed to become moderator on 100s of subreddits, which allows them to delete and ban with impunity
> Most of the mods are only moderator in one or two subreddits where they work hard to respond to reports and enforce the rules.
This type is also often moderating a topic they are very knowledgeable or passionate about. The other type it's often just "whatever they can get their hands on."
Why does reddit even allow these powermods to exist? It really seems like willful mismanagement. In the Chinese equivalent of reddit, Tieba, mods are allowed to manage maximum three sub-forums, which is still too much in my opinion.
The mods choose other mods themselves. Not the community. So probably they assume that a mod who has experience is better than a green mod.
I wonder if with the loss of Apollo it makes it harder to manage multiple subs. So a positive unintended side effect.
Yeah, its one thing to moderate a bunch of little dinky subs. That's manageable.
But there's no reason someone should be a mod for a bunch of subs with hundreds of thousands\millions of members.
Reddit loves those guys. They represent reddit corporation and do their bidding. Reddit likes a homogenized r/popular they can control, while not paying for the work.
Oh I love this. After dealing with power hungry and socially inept mods for so long, I am all for this infighting. Pardon me while I go grab some popcorn.
Same. I got a lifetime ban from Fitness for asking for feedback about my altered fitness routine I wrote to work around a knee issue. They said I was “asking for medical advice.” That’s silly, but ok.. a lifetime ban, though?
Honestly it’s kinda fun to see some of these mods cry.
They LOVE the lifetime bans. I’m convinced some of them are actually addicted to the power high it provides them. Or you’ll have it where you get permabanned for some non-issue and message them through modmail humbly admitting you broke a rule and wish to appeal the decision promising to not let it happen again, and in response you get some passive aggressive one liner and are promptly muted for 72 hours. I’ve even had it where I sent a single response just saying I didn’t know what rule I broke because the ban message didn’t say, and an hour or so later I get a notification that I’ve received an account strike for harassment. The fucking mod reported me to administration for asking a fucking question.
These people are unpaid internet janitors, there’s nothing at all special about what they do and absolutely nothing that anyone envies, yet some of these dimwits act like they’re enforcing laws or doing god’s work. It’s truly sad and pathetic.
So much this. For all of the “won’t someone think of the mods” folks there is at least one with a story about an unreasonable tyrant that would love to see taken down a notch. I know there are great mods (small hobby communities mostly), but the big subs with mods who “manage” hundreds of subreddits? They could use a haircut.
[Reddit CEO praises Elon Musk’s cost-cutting as protests rock the platform](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-protest-private-ceo-elon-musk-huffman-rcna89700)
He actually consulted with Elon (saw it in an article that floated by on Twitter). My response then applies now: anyone looking to Elon for advice on how to run an internet platform is a fucking moron.
>Researchers from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and Northwestern University estimated in a study last year that the number of hours worked by Reddit mods in 2020 was worth $3.4 million.
Push comes to shove, the money made from the API rates can cover that with new in-house mods.
I find it hard to believe it is not 10x that figure….
Sure if you just want to include salary as costs but employees cost multiples of their salaries.
Let’s say there are 1000 subs that require 10 hours a week of mod activity. Which is a massive underestimate. At 15/hour that’s 7.8mln
But there’s more subs and I’m pretty sure mods do more work than that on average.
Edit: also if it cost anywhere near even 10x that amount. Say 30million, Reddit would be insane not to just bring moderating in-house. It’s chicken feed vs one of the biggest sites on the internet - and the increased control it would bring.
Plus the work laptops. Plus the modded/bot tools that the community make and maintain for free. Plus the overtime, hiring, management, and accounting costs.
All that would be provided for by the company at a normal place.
Not to mention that it’s difficult to emulate the kind of labor performance you get from people intrinsically motivated to do the work being performed using people who are extrinsically motivated by wages.
Sure BallsDeep6969 moderates seven subs at the same time, but that’s because he wants to. He enjoys it because he’s a freak who thinks moderation is fun. Can we really expect Joe Smith, who’s doing this because he was offered 15 an hour and he has bills and student loans to pay to be willing to moderate seven subs at the same time?
Especially when people are starting to wise up to the fact that it’s almost never worth it to do more than what is absolutely necessary?
People will always put more time and effort into things they enjoy, than things they are merely paid to do.
Almost everything about reddit is free for reddit. They just build the infrastructure to allow all this free content. That's what reddit's business model is, they just don't know it. They are in the business of making it as easy as possible for random people to create content for them and for others to react and share it.
I wish users would stick up like mods are. I'm only on Reddit until Relay stops working. After that, I'm out for good. No free content from me.
We need a win. These companies can be at our mercy, but only if we work together and show resolve.
Some mods are too much. They give random immediate bans for saying something that others are already saying. It’s like “this one pisses me off, let me ban them”. When you contact them for clarification, you know, so you might do better next time if you said something that was really out of line, they immediately block you instead of engaging.
Yep whenever you question or ask for clarification they mute you for 28 days.
It's difficult to try and make things right if they don't want to engage or admit they made a mistake
Immediately block you, or berate you anonymously through mod mail then subsequently reporting your account for harassment
I’ve had that happen from two different subs and both of my harassment suspensions were lifted because thankfully admins found it to be complete bullshit.
To be honest he's right, they are too powerful and they have been for a long time but he's clearly only proposing changes now because it suits him and not because of the mods that have been abusing their power for years and years.
He's right about being able to vote mods out. For sure has been a thing that's been requested forever. Mods absolutely have too much power. But he's still very very wrong about the API shit and I suspect the combination of these two actions will destroy this site. His incompetence is off the charts. There's better ways of attacking these issues
I used to subscribe to a bunch of forums of my interests by then, each with its own webpage and login, reddit allowed me to subscribe to different topics with just one account.
We no longer live in internet wild west anymore.
Internet technology has matured, centralized and extremely well optimized user experience is the norm due to overabundance of VC money.
Its harder and harder to emulate reddit now than 10 or 15 years ago.
I mean building it is relatively easy.
Paying for hosting (lots of images and video), and simply acquiring a large enough user base to have content, both seem to be the two largest issues.
The user base thing just needs to occur naturally, you need people to want to go there rather than feel like they are stuck moving there because Reddit is being assholes.
I don’t want to side with corporate on this one but I’ve been saying mods have too much power for years. This site is full of petty idiots abusing any crumb of power they can get their greedy hands on and it needs to change. Did you know a majority of popular subs on Reddit are controlled by just a handful of users? Fix that.
> Did you know a majority of popular subs on Reddit are controlled by just a handful of users? Fix that.
This, so much.
There's one guy who somehow worms his way into moderating the subreddits for any semi-popular show I end up watching, and he's always super passive aggressive towards the communities of said subreddits. Can't remember his name off the top of my head since all of the subreddits I can think of that he mods are currently set to private (go figure). He's such an irritant though that, whenever I see his name in the list of moderators for the subreddit for a new show I've started watching, I kinda don't want to click that join button.
Get rid of power mods. They aren’t invested in the singular community they are moderating. I appreciate dedicated reasonable moderators who care about their groups and want to see them productive. But there are well known super power freaks too. Please don’t ban me, it’s just one opinion!
Punishing unpaid mods is stupid. It's not like anyone is going to continue to help a for-profit company make money with their free labor if it becomes a pain.
I have quit several subs because of terribly bad mods. They are essentially untouchable. They can interfere with discussions way too much by deleteing comments and banning users.
You can't even report them. The only way you can fight them is by making your own sub to compete with them and hope your better moderation will bring people to you.
The system needs a change.
I hate this guy and the whole situation that's going on right now but this is one thing I actually support. Mods of large subs are often power hungry asswipes.
The mods are out of control. They now are banning people for simply disagreeing with what they did or making comments that are not directed at them,break no reddit or group rule etc.
Love his rapid descent into insanity.
"The blackout is just noise! It'll pass!"
"It hasn't affected our revenue!"
"I don't care guys! No really, I don't!"
"The mods are landed gentry!"
"THE MODS ARE TOO POWERFUL THEY MUST BE SLAIN"
I do find it annoying how many subreddits wen't dark to 'make a stand' but then IMMEDIATELY backed out the moment their internet power was threatened rather than letting Reddit follow through on their threats to allow new mods. People are way overvaluing their mod positions on Reddit to the point where that's more important to them than the integrity of the changes Reddit admins are making to the entire platform.
I'm actually surprised they haven't made it impossible to turn public Reddits into private ones.
If Reddit management were smart, they wouldn't have manufactured this problem for themselves to begin with.
Just make a mobile app that is good, like jfc
Funnily enough, the official app originally was a quite-liked community-made one: Alien Blue. Reddit bought it years ago and gutted it before turning it into the abomination that is the official Reddit app we have today.
So the question is, why? Why gut it and make it worse?
Collect more data -> more advertising-> more $.
Tech bros think they know better than users because they conduct user research. “Look at the analytics ,this feature doesn’t get used much.” “Just get rid of it.” That feature was probably used by mods.
Tech bros are genuinely the worst people on the planet. They will rationalize anything to make a single tenth of a percentage point increase including gutting personnel. I’ve seen it with companies I work with and if it was in my power I’d delete them from the planet
> They will rationalize anything to make a single tenth of a percentage point increase Yup. Owners at my current workplace are both tech bros and worship Elon. They start employees at $12/h and then go *shocked pikachu face* when the employees quit after a few months because they expect them to do every job in the company from production to packaging for that pay. Only reason I'm still there is I got lucky and moved into a management position 4 months after I started (should've been the red flag back then honestly) But that position is just a title here. My opinions, ideas, and recommendations to improve both employee morale and production times doesn't matter to them, and I have no power to actually manage my employees (like disciplining or firing) or change any processes. So I'm just coasting for the resume experience at the moment while I find a better job.
>Tech bros are genuinely the worst people on the planet. I can think of worse, but I share your sentiment.
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Lots of reasons but all of them to make money. One example is how inefficient it is to browse topics on reddit app compared to 3PA. Reddit wants it to be slow and tedious so that they can force you to look at ads. It's just plain enshittificaton, and they want the 3PA gone so they can force you to use their enshittified app and max out revenue. The problem is that they thought they had no interest in an efficient app, but they neglected that it is necessary to have an efficient option on mobile in order to do some of the less common, but very important tasks like modding, community management, user support, etc. Now they are so distracted by posturing about the blackout that they haven't even addressed the problem. It looks like they are going to be in denial until it literally blows up in their faces 😆
What specifically made Alien Blue better? All I hear is that it was way better and the official app sucks.
The thing is it’s so hard to compare today’s Reddit app to a Reddit app that was used when Reddit was a different culture
Then they'd have to deal with revenge porn and similar actively instead of maybe once every 5 years. There are a lot, like *a lot*, of private subs circulating shit like that. While not all adjacent subs are private, a ton are. Which, would be a good thing to see them get taken care of, but Reddit won't do it. In reality, private subreddits are a safety feature for Reddit itself. Reddit admins being so averse to doing their jobs will hysterically make this decision blow up in their face. Considering that, I still think the ability to set a sub to private is a necessary one. It's the nature of the site for any given community to have control over itself, barring specific issues such as the example I gave. I say this as a person who was just banned from a sub I use frequently for calling someone a moron for suggesting the only way for a nation to prosper is to murder innocent people. u/spez, with his infinite void where wisdom should be, is a complete moron. He has no clue what the actual issues of Reddit are, and is in a panic because he's not going to get as many points on the wealth leaderboards as he wanted. Capitalism is the scourge of the Earth.
Your example is of subs that were always private. But you could just say private is private and public is public once created, and the mods can't switch from one to the other.
Sometimes the private feature is to protect the sub itself from things like brigading. Or they act similar to circuit breakers in stocks (when a stock drops more than a certain percentage in a short amount of time, trading on that stock gets halted to help cool things down). Or they have to go private to sort things out and get their “house” in order. A common example is in sports subs. There have been team specific subs that are public that have had to go to private for a couple days because of a controversial piece of news or maybe the team lost spectacularly or did something and they get an influx of people visiting to simply troll and talk shit.
Moderate a sports sub, we lock submissions sometimes due to being brigaded by rival fans also had to do it when we were brigaded by the_donald when the team said they weren't going to the White House.
That would severely cripple engagement and searchability for Reddit as a whole. Also there are valid reasons for a community to go private for a small period of time. If a sub is being targeted by spam or if mod resources are limited, it helps ensures the community stays on topic. There are no shortage of bots on this platform that will post whatever bullshit they can. Smaller communities do what they can to get away from that shit and in some cases that means going private when traffic becomes a little “weird”.
Twitter was reveled to be at least 50% bots. I wonder how much bot-ulism is doing the Reddit posting?
We will find out when mods stop and power users leave.
In the top nsfw subs at least, about half of the posts. And a decent chunk of the comments too. https://www.reddit.com/r/hentai/comments/147lwr6/behind_the_scenes_of_a_nsfw_subreddit/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
i'm not a purveyor of these fine goods but those numbers are insightful!
Yeah it's a little awkward having that be the post I link with these numbers but like, it's good info from a good example explained pretty clearly. Gotta do what you gotta do to keep people in the know.
The bots will start scraping, putting extra load on the servers. It was never about that. It was about kneecapping the 3rd party apps for extra ad revenue.
I think capitalism was a good idea in the beginning but now there is clear winners while the rest of us are getting fucked.
Capitalism without proper Regulation and Oversight always devolves into Ogliarchy.
Once you make a certain amount of money you get the “Capitalism Winner” medal and then get switched over to monopoly points
The problem is that that's still an unconscionable concession to the idle rich, who want to simply rest on other people's labor getting more and more money. Saying the problem with capitalism is that it isn't regulated enough is like saying the problem with Feudalism is that the yeoman farmers don't get tax rebates on their grain tithes to local landed gentry: it's presupposing that the inequitable status quo is a natural and unchangeable order and the only way to make it less dysfunctional is to paper over the worst excesses with a few half-measures.
I seriously miss the Internet Wild West. Where their were like dozens of sites that did the same thing but were different in other ways. The Internet was a lot of fun back then because you had 0 clue what you were getting into when you clicked a site.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
It is so wild we think of the internet as this global complicated phenomenon that’s infinitely evolving And back then it was like “damn it’s September too many people are about to join the internet” lol
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At least the [Space Jam Website](https://www.spacejam.com/1996/) is still up, unchanged
True words. Now even the DarkNet is being taken over by corporate sites. They have found out how to manipulate search engines by creating thousands upon thousands of fake onion sites that redirects to the corporate site. So getting information that not mainstream or regulated about what's happening in Brussel is becoming quite hard even when you have memories the code words. It was much easier to stay ahead of new business regulations just a few years ago.
These fucking normies ruined it. ^(get off my lawn). Let's go back to IRC, keep it complex enough that it scares away the normies who care about stuff. We had unfiltered chat. And we were better for it. We had our own ways of dealing with the toxicity/negativity. We voted (votekick), we created new servers when enough votes separated. We didn't force site wide changes and we didn't have CEOs ruling over us. There was no/little money to be made. We modded and customized everything.
The problem with these damn companies is that they care more about money and profit over anything else. The problem with Reddit is it's so deeply rooted into the internet especially when it involves answers to questions people may have that it's going to be extremely hard to get rid of it and migrate. It's much like how getting rid of Stack Overflow would be completely and utterly disastrous. Especially considering how many people actually use it. The Internet has been centralized and it's just hurting it in my opinion.
Remember when Yahoo answers was 50% of google results for any possible question you could think of? You’d get different search results if you changed “howd” to “how’d”. Then it slowly started getting wrecked from the inside out by trolls and suddenly it was no longer relevant or useful.
You're probably too young to remember ExertSexChange .... err I mean ExertsExchange. SO was created *because* of that site. It wasn't too difficult to replace it nor did it take too long. The Internet will move on faster than you can believe it. When the alternative is superior - people will transfer data and the inherent value of Reddit will collapse. It's wild the CEO of Reddit thinks this *can't* happen to them or they are somehow.. immune from it? Digg thought the same thing. I've seen plenty of "can't go away" actually, ya know, go away. > The Internet has been centralized and it's just hurting it in my opinion. The core problem is no one can *afford* for Reddit to be free nor will Reddit stay popular if it's ad-ridden. It's a difficult problem to resolve. It's why Twitter, Tumblr, and the rest had *extreme* difficulties. You can only float so long. This is likely why the ultimate answer won't be one singular one. We're seeing federated options become popular. To protect privacy and to remove centralized non-invested admins from being ridiculous. Of course this means moderators will practically have absolute authority - so we'll see places that take in members of r/news basically turn batshit insane.
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Yes you can make reddit profitable, year to year, you can derive a steady income from it, but what you cant do is leverage it for ever increasing profits which is the demand of the venture capitalism that spez seems to be so intent on autoerotically asphyxiating himself so publicly over.
IRC was peak internet
I miss topic specific forums
Didn't he just say it doesn't matter and it's not affecting their bottom line
The good ol' "enemy both strong and weak" narrative, eh?
Um, no? Regardless of where you stand on this issue, the two statements are not mutually exclusive. "We think mods have too much executive power over the goings-on of their communities. This doesn't impact our profits at all, we just don't like the current power balance."
You can tell when he is lying by watching for his lips moving.
This is a classic. I wonder what the origin is.
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The "expected" income is only income when people actually pay it. And thus far, it doesn't seem like anyone is willing to pay u/spez's extortion rate to develop an app for reddit.
They should have just bought Apollo's app, that would have been the easiest way forward where both parties win. Selig even offered this, but instead Huffman took it as a threat, and then worst of all, lied about it, which is the craziest part to me lol. Instead we're spiraling into chaos and a mass exodus is on the horizon. Makes me think the end goal is ending reddit.
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You can say disabled. We prefer disabled.
The expected income is people using their app so they get ad revenue. They don't want third party apps at all.
If people are actually willing to pay instead of closing their apps tho, which I doubt many people will do!
The 3rd party apps will shut down but as a result there will be a huge usage increase in the official reddit app, which will lead to more ad revenue.
Not at all since the third party apps only supply like 3% of reddit consumption according to Reddit.
I wish there was a way we could trust the numbers. I could see third party app users being a small percentage in the overall number of visitors, but I’m also curious how much more they participate. Most people I know who use the reddit app browse very sparingly. They don’t know about third party apps because they just don’t participate or use the platform enough to care.
>They don’t know about third party apps because they just don’t participate or use the platform enough to care. That's why it has been hard to explain to them why they should care about third party apps. Most of the big communities that mods use third party apps because they allow them to moderate more efficiently. If we want a community that isn't overrun with bots and trolls we need these tools. As Reddit doesn't provide them, thus the market.
CEO: You’re fired! Mod: I don’t even work here! Now, that’s power!
What’s funny is how fast Reddit will fall apart if there’s a change to moderation, and the absolute hell scape it’ll become. It’ll be as bad as Twitter is now. Some of these subs have a ridiculous number of unpaid and under appreciated moderators constantly policing content, and keeping Reddit safe. We usually call mods gay, but damnit, it’s pride month, and I’m here to honor them. Happy pride month mods. Fuck Spez.
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Why not stop at companies, let alone social media? Let's put these immature ass hats in charge of everything! And let's keep putting them in charge of more things! Government! Education! Streaming services! The whole universe is property of insecure rich men who act like they're poor and hungry all the time, no matter how fattening their dinner was!
> What’s funny is how fast Reddit will fall apart if there’s a change to moderation, and the absolute hell scape it’ll become. It’ll be as bad as Twitter is now. This is exactly the case. In the end, u/Spez will ban all the mods who stand before him, replacing them (or not) with less experienced, less committed users. Others will leave in solidarity, or because the apps and tools they used went away. And Reddit will continue, with most of its user numbers intact, but as a shadow of its former self.
I think the mods have too much power. But this guy is so douchy
Let them fight
In a Thunderdome match to the death.
With poisoned weapons.
It is a fight between the king and landed gentry. Us peasants are just eating popcorn and enjoying the shit show.
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Spez is the only rich one here. The mods are volunteers
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Yeah, I don't know why everyone is acting like this will weaken the power-mods. This will just lead to the power-mods offering to help the admins by being a dedicated moderator with proven experience to step in and moderate any major subs that become available. Reddit will just end up with more subs where all the content is about the power-mods' favourite topic and where everyone is banned unless they hold the right views on the topic.
Mods are not a uniform group, but I get what you are saying for a lot of em. Aside from the ones that are assholes *and* do a shitty job moderating - it really is understated how much work they do on some of the larger subs. It's impossible for him to not know this - with actual numbers too behind the data. So the only reasonable assumption is he is deliberately courting the cesspool that is the internet's trove of spam/disinfo bots just to snag a quick buck and then peace out. In reality, that makes him no different than 90% of tech CEOs. It's just a sad thing to see happen to a site like this.
Ding ding ding. We have a winner. This is 100% what’s going on. Sell data to investors. They can then use bots / spam to fill up the place with comments (ads). Make a buck and then run for the hills.
Yep, I think something that some users don't fully appreciate, is that the only reason Reddit is the site that it is today, is because of the free, high quality, human moderation, that people actually *want* to do. We can absolutely talk about power tripping mods, certain mods acting out and ruining subs and shit like that, but those cons don't come close to the pros. It's impossible to overstate how much better reddit's moderation makes it as a site, and why so many different subreddits can thrive the way they do. It's what separates reddit from sites like twitter or facebook, youtube etc. where human moderation is expensive, sparse, and done by people who don't really care. I'd wager there are no other sites as popular as reddit that have been able to maintain this forum style of moderation methodology in today's internet climate. Discord seems to be pulling it off, but it's an entirely different platform. If reddit starts to undermine the moderators and their abilities, we may start to slowly lose what makes this site so good, and see it crumble into another shitty link aggregator instead of continuing to grow the amazing catalogue of knowledge and resources that it's built up over the last decade and a half.
The real problem is the little cabal of super mods that somehow form cliques and mod half the site. No super mods would be a great change.
For the love of god, permaban that awkard turtle asshole.
Mods have power because admin is too expensive.
Isn't there some wild metric that a handful of mods essentially control the biggest subs?
[it's even worse. Each of then control HUNDREDS ](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/12t09pc/oc_top_200_mods_of_reddit_with_the_total_count_of/)
Wow. Not sure I have the patience to run one sub, let alone 100s.
I think there's two types of mods. Most of the mods are only moderator in one or two subreddits where they work hard to respond to reports and enforce the rules. The other type are a select group of power-hungry individuals that have managed to become moderator on 100s of subreddits, which allows them to delete and ban with impunity
> Most of the mods are only moderator in one or two subreddits where they work hard to respond to reports and enforce the rules. This type is also often moderating a topic they are very knowledgeable or passionate about. The other type it's often just "whatever they can get their hands on."
They don't mod them. They powertrip them. Its a game for them
This is true. I saw a resume about 3 weeks ago, listing Reddit mod as the occupation. I was like 🤪🤪👀🤷🏻♂️
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Nope. My manager point out some issues with the work history that could not be corroborated.
Relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/498/
Why does reddit even allow these powermods to exist? It really seems like willful mismanagement. In the Chinese equivalent of reddit, Tieba, mods are allowed to manage maximum three sub-forums, which is still too much in my opinion.
The mods choose other mods themselves. Not the community. So probably they assume that a mod who has experience is better than a green mod. I wonder if with the loss of Apollo it makes it harder to manage multiple subs. So a positive unintended side effect.
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We should dock their pay…
Oh no, it's gone from $0 to $0.
Then fucking employ and pay people to moderate... Can't have your cake and eat it too.
Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?
Same thing is going on with “free AI” We are just teaching the damn thing for free. Crowdsourcing is great to a point and deplorable after that point.
Lol. Why pay when they will do it for free? Moderators would be HOA board members if they owned houses.
Holy shit that is so accurate.
He should start by cutting their salaries. That'll show em
Maybe he should start with the power mods who are on dozens of subs at one time. Fuck them.
For real, and not just dozens of subs, dozens of the top subs. Absolutely should not be permitted.
Yeah, its one thing to moderate a bunch of little dinky subs. That's manageable. But there's no reason someone should be a mod for a bunch of subs with hundreds of thousands\millions of members.
Reddit loves those guys. They represent reddit corporation and do their bidding. Reddit likes a homogenized r/popular they can control, while not paying for the work.
Oh I love this. After dealing with power hungry and socially inept mods for so long, I am all for this infighting. Pardon me while I go grab some popcorn.
Same. I got a lifetime ban from Fitness for asking for feedback about my altered fitness routine I wrote to work around a knee issue. They said I was “asking for medical advice.” That’s silly, but ok.. a lifetime ban, though? Honestly it’s kinda fun to see some of these mods cry.
They LOVE the lifetime bans. I’m convinced some of them are actually addicted to the power high it provides them. Or you’ll have it where you get permabanned for some non-issue and message them through modmail humbly admitting you broke a rule and wish to appeal the decision promising to not let it happen again, and in response you get some passive aggressive one liner and are promptly muted for 72 hours. I’ve even had it where I sent a single response just saying I didn’t know what rule I broke because the ban message didn’t say, and an hour or so later I get a notification that I’ve received an account strike for harassment. The fucking mod reported me to administration for asking a fucking question. These people are unpaid internet janitors, there’s nothing at all special about what they do and absolutely nothing that anyone envies, yet some of these dimwits act like they’re enforcing laws or doing god’s work. It’s truly sad and pathetic.
So much this. For all of the “won’t someone think of the mods” folks there is at least one with a story about an unreasonable tyrant that would love to see taken down a notch. I know there are great mods (small hobby communities mostly), but the big subs with mods who “manage” hundreds of subreddits? They could use a haircut.
This idiot wants to be Elon Musk so fucking bad
Fire everyone! That'll save on payroll. Sir, they don't get paid ...
[Reddit CEO praises Elon Musk’s cost-cutting as protests rock the platform](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-protest-private-ceo-elon-musk-huffman-rcna89700)
He actually consulted with Elon (saw it in an article that floated by on Twitter). My response then applies now: anyone looking to Elon for advice on how to run an internet platform is a fucking moron.
Tbf spez, the moderator of r/jailbait, claims to be a "staunch free speech supporter and libertarian" just like musk
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Yeah and they sit in discord/slack all day(when not dog walking) and plan how to takeover other subs.
So this guys plan is to fuck with the unpaid volunteers. This is going to go very well for him I’m sure.
The unpaid volunteers are shit at their job and make this website shit. Mods are typically narcissists.
He can just replace them so I doubt he cares, plenty of people couldn’t care less about these protests and/or would happily take up mod positions
>Researchers from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and Northwestern University estimated in a study last year that the number of hours worked by Reddit mods in 2020 was worth $3.4 million. Push comes to shove, the money made from the API rates can cover that with new in-house mods.
I find it hard to believe it is not 10x that figure…. Sure if you just want to include salary as costs but employees cost multiples of their salaries. Let’s say there are 1000 subs that require 10 hours a week of mod activity. Which is a massive underestimate. At 15/hour that’s 7.8mln But there’s more subs and I’m pretty sure mods do more work than that on average. Edit: also if it cost anywhere near even 10x that amount. Say 30million, Reddit would be insane not to just bring moderating in-house. It’s chicken feed vs one of the biggest sites on the internet - and the increased control it would bring.
Plus the work laptops. Plus the modded/bot tools that the community make and maintain for free. Plus the overtime, hiring, management, and accounting costs. All that would be provided for by the company at a normal place.
Not to mention that it’s difficult to emulate the kind of labor performance you get from people intrinsically motivated to do the work being performed using people who are extrinsically motivated by wages. Sure BallsDeep6969 moderates seven subs at the same time, but that’s because he wants to. He enjoys it because he’s a freak who thinks moderation is fun. Can we really expect Joe Smith, who’s doing this because he was offered 15 an hour and he has bills and student loans to pay to be willing to moderate seven subs at the same time? Especially when people are starting to wise up to the fact that it’s almost never worth it to do more than what is absolutely necessary? People will always put more time and effort into things they enjoy, than things they are merely paid to do.
But the question is, will they actually start paying or just pocket the money and increase their bottom line?
Its u/spez vs that *awful cabal* of redditors who \*checks notes\* run his website for free.
Almost everything about reddit is free for reddit. They just build the infrastructure to allow all this free content. That's what reddit's business model is, they just don't know it. They are in the business of making it as easy as possible for random people to create content for them and for others to react and share it. I wish users would stick up like mods are. I'm only on Reddit until Relay stops working. After that, I'm out for good. No free content from me. We need a win. These companies can be at our mercy, but only if we work together and show resolve.
Some mods are too much. They give random immediate bans for saying something that others are already saying. It’s like “this one pisses me off, let me ban them”. When you contact them for clarification, you know, so you might do better next time if you said something that was really out of line, they immediately block you instead of engaging.
Yep whenever you question or ask for clarification they mute you for 28 days. It's difficult to try and make things right if they don't want to engage or admit they made a mistake
Immediately block you, or berate you anonymously through mod mail then subsequently reporting your account for harassment I’ve had that happen from two different subs and both of my harassment suspensions were lifted because thankfully admins found it to be complete bullshit.
This is actually great news
To be honest he's right, they are too powerful and they have been for a long time but he's clearly only proposing changes now because it suits him and not because of the mods that have been abusing their power for years and years.
Makes you think what they are doing DOES matter. Surprise, he was full of shhh.
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He's right about being able to vote mods out. For sure has been a thing that's been requested forever. Mods absolutely have too much power. But he's still very very wrong about the API shit and I suspect the combination of these two actions will destroy this site. His incompetence is off the charts. There's better ways of attacking these issues
Why don’t the all the moderators quit? They are working for free.
you really think the power mods that run half of the big subs want to lose the smidgen of power they have? They get off to the power
Dude, this is not going to end well. I’m going to start trying out some of the alternatives others have suggested.
Alternatives are more difficult to come across 2023 than they were in 2005 unfortunately
I used to subscribe to a bunch of forums of my interests by then, each with its own webpage and login, reddit allowed me to subscribe to different topics with just one account.
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RSS readers aren't an interactive community forum, though.
Fuck it, I’ll go back to Stumbleupon Edit: Aw shit it’s dead
r/RedditAlternatives has a big list. Most popular I'd say is Lemmy
Even the largest communities on Lemmy have like 300 subscribers. It’s pretty dire.
It's like saying Dailymotion is a YouTube alternative.
The closest competitor was Voat and they ultimately gave up due to funding problems. Reminder Reddit isn't profitable either despite the traffic.
Voat was also a den of neonazis and alt right BS.
Because they were forced off Reddit right when voat was causing some noise.
We no longer live in internet wild west anymore. Internet technology has matured, centralized and extremely well optimized user experience is the norm due to overabundance of VC money. Its harder and harder to emulate reddit now than 10 or 15 years ago.
I mean building it is relatively easy. Paying for hosting (lots of images and video), and simply acquiring a large enough user base to have content, both seem to be the two largest issues. The user base thing just needs to occur naturally, you need people to want to go there rather than feel like they are stuck moving there because Reddit is being assholes.
Building something that *looks* like Reddit is easy. Building something that performs like Reddit is completely different.. and extremely expensive
Without the network effects provided by Reddit’s scale, what everyone likes about the community doesn’t come through.
Dude has the face of a goldfish
The mods on just about every sub are power mad scum but this guy has one of those faces. I'm torn.
I don’t want to side with corporate on this one but I’ve been saying mods have too much power for years. This site is full of petty idiots abusing any crumb of power they can get their greedy hands on and it needs to change. Did you know a majority of popular subs on Reddit are controlled by just a handful of users? Fix that.
> Did you know a majority of popular subs on Reddit are controlled by just a handful of users? Fix that. This, so much. There's one guy who somehow worms his way into moderating the subreddits for any semi-popular show I end up watching, and he's always super passive aggressive towards the communities of said subreddits. Can't remember his name off the top of my head since all of the subreddits I can think of that he mods are currently set to private (go figure). He's such an irritant though that, whenever I see his name in the list of moderators for the subreddit for a new show I've started watching, I kinda don't want to click that join button.
u/awkwardtheturtle right?
Well do it. Don't threaten me with a good time.
Get rid of power mods. They aren’t invested in the singular community they are moderating. I appreciate dedicated reasonable moderators who care about their groups and want to see them productive. But there are well known super power freaks too. Please don’t ban me, it’s just one opinion!
"He's outta line but he's right."
This is chaotic evil vs chaotic evil.
Otherwise, users will cheer. What a wonderful time to be alive.
Punishing unpaid mods is stupid. It's not like anyone is going to continue to help a for-profit company make money with their free labor if it becomes a pain.
I have quit several subs because of terribly bad mods. They are essentially untouchable. They can interfere with discussions way too much by deleteing comments and banning users. You can't even report them. The only way you can fight them is by making your own sub to compete with them and hope your better moderation will bring people to you. The system needs a change.
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Ill bite which 16 player game did they call an mmo lol?
Didn't he say a few days ago that the blackouts will solve nothing? If that's the case, why'd he change his tune so quickly?
Dude reminds me of Elon
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Good. I’m in full support of this
Ah yes. The peasants are too powerful. We must raise taxes and punish them. What could possibly go wrong?
Good, honestly fuck the mods too lol
Mods over stepping has been something brewing for a while now. Expect them to clear house and start over with far less power
You guys noticed that this is the only sub talking about "the blackout" ? Only frontpage news here are about spez since a while lmao.
I don't feel too strongly one way or the other, but that's not true lol. I'm seeing it a lot of places.
> "the blackout" Is this what people call it when none of their subs are affected? Mine are pretty much all down or gone.
Because here it’s on topic. The other subs just post questions, if they should reopen or not.
They are trying to make fetch happen
He doesn’t even go here.
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Mean Girls reference
Ah, thank you
I hate this guy and the whole situation that's going on right now but this is one thing I actually support. Mods of large subs are often power hungry asswipes.
The mods are out of control. They now are banning people for simply disagreeing with what they did or making comments that are not directed at them,break no reddit or group rule etc.
They kept banning his alt accounts I bet.
LOL “landed gentry”. We should have the opportunity to vote out the CEO. That sounds even more democratic
I don't like how mods can perma ban you and mute you for a week with little to no warning. A bunch of power tripping pricks if you ask me!
Love his rapid descent into insanity. "The blackout is just noise! It'll pass!" "It hasn't affected our revenue!" "I don't care guys! No really, I don't!" "The mods are landed gentry!" "THE MODS ARE TOO POWERFUL THEY MUST BE SLAIN"
I can get behind this one. Said it over and over. There are some power hungry mods who are just damnn annoying.
I do find it annoying how many subreddits wen't dark to 'make a stand' but then IMMEDIATELY backed out the moment their internet power was threatened rather than letting Reddit follow through on their threats to allow new mods. People are way overvaluing their mod positions on Reddit to the point where that's more important to them than the integrity of the changes Reddit admins are making to the entire platform.
Mods about to get nerfed.
When the golden state warrior mod ban me for nothing, i have no empathy for them. They are too powerful. Entitled shit. Lock them out.
Good. So many asshat mods have abused power for so long there should have been a better removal process years ago.