But then they’d get banned and lose all that Reddit karma and their very important badges
And oops all the subs that aren’t total shit have min-karma requirements these days… hope you didn’t enjoy posting in those?
there just is this disconnect between the Redditors who imagine that all the users are behind them and the actual masses who will keep scrolling r/aww and mildlyinteresting and so on. If 5-10% of users want to self-immolate and be banned, that’s fine. People will get bored of the harassment campaign in a couple weeks, and the world will generally keep turning.
Mod labor is not irreplaceable either. The six people running 60 of the top 100 subs aren’t doing any personal work either, they’re just setting up scripts/etc. And at a lower level, there is an infinite supply of people willing to be petty tyrants for a modicum of personal power.
The users of the TikTok-Shaped Reddit that spez is trying to pivot to don’t care about any of this and in a year they will have stabilized around a new user base. And that won’t include a lot of the current powerusers/powermods and they clearly know that and it’s fine for them.
Probably only 10% of users even comment so if you’re that engaged you’re not the users they care about. And sure, those are the people posting content etc, but the Reddit calculation clearly is that they will be able to repost tiktok videos and memes onto the subs perfectly well without the users who want to leave. Which does include me, most likely.
Gallowboob alone is responsible for a large fraction of the top-scoring content on Reddit. The labor of reposting TikTok and tumblr onto a third platform is just not as valuable as aggrieved Redditors imagine. It can be replaced by a very small shell script, and that’s all you need to do, is to keep content flowing and there’ll be a large retention of users endlessly scrolling, that’s all it takes.
Content spam is way easier to manage especially automatically and I don't mean with LLMs, just current tools.
The only reason why it's working right now is because the mods in charge of these subs are upset, and a few mods can shutdown a 30m+ sub. I suspect the number of users on r/aww that care _that much_ to get their account banned for spam.
If it was just users being upset (which would be the case if reddit reclaims them) I just don't think there's enough upset people for there to be an impact like that.
Just earlier this month Reddit started having issues with follower spam -- something that was specifically a problem because it bypassed volunteer mod control and Reddit was doing a shit job taking care of it. There were tons of threads about how to turn off those notifications.
Just yesterday Musk was lamenting about how bad the bot situation on Twitter has gotten recently.
And none of that even gets into keeping content on topic for a community, just straight up spam.
And they'd be extra motivated too, since forcibly removing the mods would be seen as escalation of the conflict.