>It's the thousands of mods and the millions of people creating and organizing the content that I go there to read. Until those people are happy with things, I'm not going back.
You go there for the user content, not the mods. You can say mods cultivate communities, but to say that they deserve credit but not the admins or platform itself seems untenable.
Furthermore, insinuations that the API changes will lead to a substantial decline in community quality via its impact on moderation seem to be broadly unsupported. It's unclear that there's a monotonic relationship between moderator power and community quality, similar to how most people would be skeptical of an argument that said that there's a monotonic relationship between state power (irl) community quality. For example, one thing that moderators have wanted to do in the past is create cross-subreddit blacklists. The admins pushed back on this with some success, which was probably healthy for the site as a whole.
Oh? Thanks so much for telling me what goes on in my head, bub.
The average bit of user-generated content is of very low quality. Which is why pretty much any successful platform, this one included, uses user-generated signals to filter the good stuff to the top. And any social context is prone to vicious circles where dark triad find somewhere successful and ruin it. Preventing that requires active weeding. All of that is labor I value.
The platform deserves some credit. But as all the developers here know, Reddit is not succeeding on the strength of its software. Reddit doesn't have a technology moat. It's a pretty standard web forum. They didn't invent it, they didn't perfect it, and not only could it be replicated, it has been many times.
So should the platform get paid? Definitely. Reddit-the-corporation should have enough cashflow to cover the bills and support the necessary staff. But right now the tail is trying to wag the dog, and Reddit-the-community is not having it.
>Thanks so much for telling me what goes on in my head, bub.
I mean, if you're going to Reddit to marvel at the sidebar rules or CSS stylings, then I guess you're going there for the mods qua mods. But I would assume that this represents a relatively rare user psychographic. Beyond this, my point is that it's unfair to give the mods credit for indirectly cultivating communities but refuse to extend this same consideration to the admins or platform.
>The average bit of user-generated content is of very low quality. Which is why pretty much any successful platform, this one included, uses user-generated signals to filter the good stuff to the top.
Yes, and Reddit was successful long before the moderation tools that are being impacted by the API changes were created. Treating this protest as being about the basic question of whether Reddit should have moderation or not is disingenuous.
>But right now the tail is trying to wag the dog, and Reddit-the-community is not having it.
Well, the powermods aren't having it. We'll see what "Reddit-the-community" thinks when the dust settles. A bunch of activists can't claim to speak for it, though obviously they'd like to pretend that they can.
If you're claiming that the main things Reddit mods do is a bit of rule text and some CSS, then I don't think you know enough about the topic to be worth further discussion.
in the best case mods remove spam and illegal content, and beyond leave the community alone to do its thing. unfortunately typical reddit mods feel compelled to do all kinds of other things, like they're on a mission from god.
There are some subs I frequent where the mods have created bots that have completed transformed the sub for the better. Examples are the several marketplace subs, where bots are heavily used.
Mods don't just edit the css, they moderate. You can clearly see the difference a good mod team does. After the reddit blackout is over, check out the difference between /gaming and /AskHistorians. AskHistorian threads are often 90% deleted comments because people try commenting without posting any sources.
For smaller communities mods keep away trolls and spambots. They enforce custom rules that sub will have.
> Yes, and Reddit was successful long before the moderation tools that are being impacted by the API changes were created
Are you forgetting about Reddit Enhancement Suite? There is no mod that just uses the built-in reddit moderation. There hasn't been since the days when Reddit was a website only known to tech related college students.
I compare /r/gaming and /r/AskHistorians. The latter is overmoderated and exhibits what I call the "Reddit effect": people will take to be true and accurate anything that is said in a clear and authoritative tone. Yes much of what is on that subreddit is high-quality, but by no means is it all high-quality, and they often remove comments from people that dispute the narratives that are pushed there. The topics of history they choose to cover are very narrow and they have a pretty narrow view of what "history" is: the narrative of mainstream US academic historians.
It's a weird comparison to make, too. You're comparing a default subreddit that is mostly for memes with one of the subreddits held in highest regard. Lots of highly-moderated subreddits are just awful. Why not compare /r/AskHistorians with the large number of highly- but poorly-moderated subreddits? There are many (I won't name names) that you would expect to be reasonably neutral places but because of who picked the name originally have become politically extreme over time. Or just as a result of the effect of the upvote/downvote mechanism. The high influence that early votes have on submissions means that if a small group of people make it their life's work to watch /new (and they do exist!) they can control the narrative very successfully.
The idea that reddit mods are some great asset to the site is just strange, IMO. To me, they're one of the worst things about the website. Most of the big subreddits are dominated by the same group of power moderators who have some questionable conflicts of interests with outside forces. Smaller subreddits tend to be dominated by high-school-style cliques.
It's also pretty clear that some mods have relationships with Reddit admins and use that to skirt the rules themselves while bringing the hammer down on subs they don't like.
The funny part is occasionally I've come across subs without mods (someone started the sub, then stopped using Reddit), and they've mostly been great. But Reddit tries to crack down on them, and they also have ways to push power mods into any sub that gets too big.
1. You could have some kind of community influence over moderator selection for subreddits over a certain size. StackExchange has (had?) elections for moderators.
2. You could have rules preventing anyone from having moderator powers on more than a certain percentage of the site.
3. The best change would one that prevented moderators from sitting in IRC/Discord talking about reddit 24/7. Having so much meta-discussion happen "behind the scenes" is not good. The problem is that normal people who think "lol imagine having drama over an internet forum what a load of nerds" would be the best moderators but are the least interested in doing it.
I haven't. So what? Is there anything I'm wrong about in a way that you could provide meaningful evidence on? Surely you aren't arguing that only moderators are qualified to weigh in on the social value of moderators - this sort of logic wouldn't pass the laugh test if we were talking about police, or soliders, or middle managers, or low-level government bureaucrats. This whole "thin blue line"-style thinking that moderators are flirting with here is... cringey.
Fair enough. Usually this is the stance I would take in these sorts of discussions, since usually power users misunderstand how much they represent the majority of users.
But in this case I would expect that a substantial part of active users use Reddit with a 3rd party app so I'm inclined to say a lot of people will stop using it because of the passive way it is used.
I could be wrong and that is why I'm commenting. I can go back to this comment in 2-3 years. My feeling is that Reddit will have shrunk by that time
You go there for the user content, not the mods. You can say mods cultivate communities, but to say that they deserve credit but not the admins or platform itself seems untenable.
Furthermore, insinuations that the API changes will lead to a substantial decline in community quality via its impact on moderation seem to be broadly unsupported. It's unclear that there's a monotonic relationship between moderator power and community quality, similar to how most people would be skeptical of an argument that said that there's a monotonic relationship between state power (irl) community quality. For example, one thing that moderators have wanted to do in the past is create cross-subreddit blacklists. The admins pushed back on this with some success, which was probably healthy for the site as a whole.