Reddit CEO says he’ll change rules to end protest
3 years ago by Abridgedlife to c/reddit
Main points: He plans to make moderators popularly elected to more easily vote them out.
Hopes the next frontier will be subreddits as businesses.
He does not want Reddit employees to take on the work. Moderator hours were valued at 3.2 million last year, 3% of reddit’s revenue.
When the subreddits went private I visited reddit three times, then a couple of times the next day, then once the following day. I haven't visited today and honestly I'm not missing it too much. If I get the urge to visit I just come here and it acts as my reddit nicotine patch.
I just wish it wasn't always the first few results when you look up information on certain topics. Especially for really niche issues since it's often the only place with answers right now. That's basically that only time I visit reddit at this point.
Yeah I've been the same, and when I've browsed the comments there is so much aggro. Makes me wonder if it's always been like that and I was just blind to it.
Overall, the experience here is 1000 times better than Reddit
Removing relay from my home screen has helped a lot. I've accidentally gone to old reddit a couple times and didn't click on any links but most times I catch myself and come here instead.
Honestly fuck reddit. I was so tired of it, but there was nowhere else to go. At least I can develope a more healthy relationship with social media here
Reddit was pretty dope when the most popular post of the day had only 2k upvotes. They can keep their millions of users. We only need just enough.
That’s also what kind of makes me curious about Tildes too, slowly growing for them is intentional.
That's a good reason
I was logging into Reddit to delete my posts (Which Chrome removed the Nuke Reddit History extension, thanks I guess) and on the front page was just gross homophobic memes. Yeah, I don't think I'll ever going back.
popular elections in an ecosystem 1/4 bots, in which the admins hold ultimate unilateral authority.
come work for free
No thanks
builds an entire self-hosted instance of an open source, federated social media network...
Chad
Lol this is gonna be awful
They're just looking for admin-friendly volunteers to cross the picket line and kick out protesting mods. It's unsurprising that it's come to this, and has already started in various reddits (such as /r/AdviceAnimals, which still exists, apparently).
He plans to make moderators popularly elected to more easily vote them out.
I totally second this idea. The last time we tried to get the internet to seriously decide on something we got Boaty McBoatface.
Hopes the next frontier will be subreddits as businesses.
Even better. All posts in these subs can be advertisements, perfect.
He does not want Reddit employees to take on the work. Moderator hours were valued at 3.2 million last year, 3% of reddit’s revenue.
Yeah, don't even spend 3% of revenues as a cost of doing business. The soon-to-be-community-elected mods will do it for free. Super.
The last time we tried to get the internet to seriously decide on something we got Boaty McBoatface.
And lo, the Internet looked down upon it's handiwork, and verily, t'was awesome.
All posts in these (business) subs can be advertisements, perfect.
And nobody will ever go there. And, two years down the track, u/spaz will hoik up the pricing or cut them off entirely because they're making money off of a non-profitable Reddit. "We want to work with the business subs but they're not interested in talking to us and have all thrown their toys out of the pram and shut down".
Imo in 2 years down the track reddit will be scrubed of nsfw, and then sold to someone else who will maybe try to integrate it with facebook/other social medias to try and get new users
So you do all that work for nothing just to be able to be voted out? 😂
Yeah, way fewer people will be willing to put in the effort modding if they can just be voted out. And subreddits that are supposed to represent minority opinions will just get voted out by the opposition.
It’s not like they don’t know it’s not paid, if it’s a fun hobby people choose to support the communities they love they’d spend the time anyway. But with every move to make Reddit more corporate it makes the sites reliance on volunteers more exploitative.
Eh. a large majority of subreddits are moderated by just a few people as top mods. They're not modding out of the goodness of their hearts. They're modding because they're being paid to. (but not by reddit. It gives them a shit load of influence over what's on their subs, and companies find that... useful.)
Isn't that against the rules if it was proven? Or is it only if the mods post things that financially benefit them?
Whose rules? The company makes the rules, they can change them for whatever reason or no reason at all.
So everyone who left wouldn't vote and everyone who stayed can end the blackout
I'm not opposed to only going over there on old.reddit to vote the opposite of whats in Reddits best interests. Mods being a problem and you want them removed? Vote to keep them.
lol watch the voting mods out feature not work on old.reddit.
Probably because he has back end control to make sure elections give him what he wants with the veneer of popular support.
Ok, reading the article, removing mods through voting doesnt sound too bad when you consider that turtle-something mod, who moderates way too many servers and removes/bans every post/user talking shit about them. Finally we can get power hungry mods out the fucking door.
Too bad they only decided to work on it to kick those mods keeping the blackout alive. Like why do they want to fight their userbase so badly
While undeniably shitty, how amazing would it be if after instituting popular voting on mods more subreddits voted to go private? Not likely but it is tempting
I feel one of the reasons many subs have not gone indefinitely dark is that the mods too are attached to their communities, and probably rightfully so. If they are going to get booted out, which may easily happen when you leave it up to the Reddit horde to decide, then they might just decide to shut down the sub.
I made a hard decision to leave my sub two years ago; I couldn't keep up with the ever-backing up mod queue, and I was going through a divorce (good thing, I promise), and work was picking up steam. I had adopted it from /r/redditrequest several years ago because it was a fun novelty sub with like 8 posts that had clearly been dead for a couple years, with [deleted] as the creator. I revived it, and now it's a nearly 1.2M user shitposting sub. It's beautiful. It's my baby and all growed up... and it's name is /r/FUCKYOUINPARTICULAR.
Miss that place. They even tried to participate in the blackout.
Oh you want to have popular elections for mods? Do it, see what happens. Poll crashing is a fucking sport.
Oh yeah, and:
“If you’re a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. So a politician needs to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by its shareholders,” he said.
CEO of a company doesn't even understand business ownership. Business owners cannot be fired. They can be bought out. Shareholders are owners. C-level employees are almost universally also owners. Nobody can just "take away" ownership; it has to be bought, and an owner of property is the person who gets to decide whether to sell it or not. What an idiot.
He referred to the mods as landed gentry, which is such a gross and lazy way to try to get people on his side. It has a major flaw too: mods are unpaid, the whole idea behind gentry is that they make money from owning their land.
Let me help you out spez, you piece of shit, if you want to criticize the millions of dollars of unpaid work that mods do for their communities try comparing them to an HOA committee, that at least has a kernel of truth.
It's even more hilarious when the label is much more accurately applied to capital owners such as himself; they are the ones actually making money off of other people's labour via their ownership (of a company rather than land).
Let them eat cake...
I’ll go back to reddit for a day to vote him off of r/programming
There's also the long game of voting in the most appalling mods you can find.
Hey. I volunteer to change my reddit profile pic to a picture of me- with my pasty white legs- wearing socks with sandals.
Honestly like, if he makes it so mods can be popularly elected/unelected, well, he's gonna end up with the other sort of Reddit protestor -- the feral shitposters -- tearing down every mod on the whole page. I assume he would have to reverse that policy at exactly the moment he gets rid of his ... enemies, I guess? -- or else ViolentAcrezMAGAEdition is gonna be running r/worldnews with Roger Stone.
It's the bots that'll rule.
There's a shit load of botting services out there you can pay to upvote your agenda. And those services have the revenue generation to pay for the exorbitant API access.
Unless a sub is private... anyone can vote in polls, even if it's restricted. Reddit may even have it's own bots jumping in at that point.
I wonder which is a less fair, russian annexation referendums or reddit mod votes.
I'm betting it will not be one account one vote. He'll stack the deck, just wait.
Even if it is one account one vote, the bot armies will be there to ensure the outcome the admins want. Moderator puppets to do the will of the admin team, fuck us pleb slobs that are the community and make his shitty site worth visiting.
What an ass. I hope this gets some mods still over there to move here.
I don't even think it's an original idea, I'm sure there's mods in brand subs (video games, for example) who are employees for the company which owns the product. He's just making it official and I bet he's gonna ask for a pretty penny for it.
Watch subs elect actual Nazis, trolls, incels and transphobes to be moderators for the lols and then the site ends up being a cesspool.
OK so it's basically US politics now? Lol. Sham Wow. This is actually pathetic and made me crack up.
Thank you for the article, but can we talk about the eye-cancer that MSN has de-evolved into?
I click on the link, see the first 3 lines of the article (that I cannot actually click on to read the rest) followed up with an infinite wall of ads and "other articles you may enjoy".
Sounds like you need an adblock
Deleting the subreddits would be an easily reversible action for admins. Users will need to edit over comments to actually make a change that wouldn’t easily be reverted. Idk, maybe it could be. It would have to be a lot more users too.
I've been considering what to do with my old Reddit account. I haven't deleted it yet because I feel like it could still be of some use (and I kind of want to go through there and save some memes I've posted and stuff). I have thousands of comments/posts on there. It would be incredibly time consuming to edit every single one. Is it worth it to take the time to actually do that?
I really hate the idea of that dickhead profiting off of content I created and I'd like to take a more proactive approach to this whole thing. Plus, I'm curious as to what the impact/reaction would be - if any.
There are several tools what may help you archive then overwrite your content. Check them out and let us know what you decide to do. The content is what makes Reddit special. If that content is not only reduced but available in a better format over here… it’s a win for everybody but the IPO bagholders
"There are several tools what may help you archive then overwrite your content."
You'll have to do it multiple times as some subs come back from private. I've noticed that on my accounts.
Yeah, that's exactly what reddit needed. For a bunch of angry mob trolls who don't want to respect community guidelines to go ahead and vote out mods enforcing said guidelines. Reddit gonna be straight up 4chan in less than a year.
Huffman has said Reddit is not profitable and in Thursday’s interview he said that Reddit’s annual revenue is less than $1 billion. Meta, owner of Instagram and Facebook reported revenue last year of $116.6 billion.
Ouch
Wow, one of the rules of r/redditrequest is not bring drama, flaming or accusations, so now they're completely going over their own rules bringing all of that because some users might not like how some mods run the sub.
I don't think he understands trolls and spammers are the most crying babies when you take down their posts and tell mods are running a dictatorship, haha.
This will mean fetish prone subs are going to be taken over by OF spammers, some clothes subs come to mind.
what I thought about kind of became true: everything he does right now is to make more profits, to work towards the IPO.
What he doesn't realize is that's not how this community works. It's in many ways crowdsourcing content and tools from the community, and the community won't be crowdsourcing just for him to make a profit. And the same goes for mods; they wanna moderate communities they are proud of on a platform that gives them freedom. If they get too much pressure from admins or the CEO and don't like the direction the platform is going in anymore, they WILL leave.
he doesn't realize what he's doing.
After debating for a few days and watching u/spez spiral even further out of reality. I nuked my account. All comments and posts edited to gibberish and then deleted followed by my account.
Lmao I called it earlier today. He's more worried about this than I thought though because this is really soon. Forcibly reopening subs is a powerful move from Reddit's end, but it's the nuclear option. It takes any perceived power away from protesting mods, and will risk Reddit paying for moderation in the future. He's trying to scare the strike... it means it's working.
go to feed...
go to feed...
Doesn't matter what changes he makes I'm never going back to that site that it's filled with karma farmers, bots and onlyfans spamers
save