There is fundementally a social contract between Reddit and its moderators. Moderators get autonomy and control, and reddit gets content that keeps users around. As long as Reddit does not pay moderators, autonomy and control is all they can give moderators. I'm investing a lot of effort, and I'd like to retain some control. IMO creating a community is more like starting an open source project on Github with a lot of community contributions.

If you take away autonomy and control from moderators, what is in it for the moderator? Imagine if github started seizing projects wholesale, taking them over and installing new maintainers. People would move off the platform.

Some people say that moderators are unpaid employees, but IMO that is only to the degree that moderators are required to carry out Reddit's agenda and priorities. We don't call OS maintainers github employees. I don't mind if Reddit benefits from my communities, as long as I can run it the way I want. If you take away autonomy and control, moderators absolutely become unpaid employees.

If Reddit didn't like my policies and took my subreddits, I would take that as a strong signal that Reddit is not the place to build my communities. The API debacle, protests, and mod removals caused me to decentralize my community more. I spam a linktree in my subreddit that links to Discord and other resources, exactly to protect against community seizeure by Reddit.

I think you touch on some real issues. One is of namespacing; folks can sit on valuable portions of the namespace and basically extract rent. We have the same issues for domains, and haven't solved it there. Some places like github semi-solve it by putting repo's in organizations, but that shifts the namespace issue to the organizational level.

The other problem is second generation moderators. Most moderators are terrible at succession planning, and so generally chose terrible successors. Many second generation moderators don't understand the original decisions that shaped the community, and what makes the original community successfully. Reddit should do more to encourage succession planning, and teach moderators how to do it.

>Karl Marx's theory of alienation describes the separation and estrangement of people from their work, their wider world, their human nature, and their selves. Alienation is a consequence of the division of labour in a capitalist society, wherein a human being's life is lived as a mechanistic part of a social class.[1]

It's been like this for a while now.

I think I even saw someone in a conservative subreddit suggest that everyone should work on a farm for a few years after college before they get real jobs. I'm still unable to determine if this was a troll or if a well-meaning conservative actually reinvented Mao's Down to the Countryside movement.

People also seem to try to shoe horn him into every topic, even when it really doesn't fit. For instance this issue is not one about some group of melancholy workers being alienated from the product, but 'capitalists' who have become so detached from their product that they are left looking at things through a sort of compression lens that leaves them with a deeply distorted view of reality. Even with your example - I agree that learning 'life skills' is extremely important for a solid development, but Mao wasn't doing that - he was effectively exiling people to rural areas, largely to replenish populations after massive famines that were created by his other harebrained schemes.

The difference is access to capital. Just like it was 150 years ago. Workers don't have enough holdings to sustain themselves without selling their body. Capitalists have enough holdings to not have to sell their body and can instead put their money to work through various means like entrepreneurship.

Also, I didn't even bring up the Down to the Countryside program as a good aspect of Mao... But since you brought it up, I figured I'd mention that his "harebrained schemes" doubled the life expectancy in China rather quickly. Like all world leaders I've studied, he did great things, and he did horrible things.

Well paid workers can amass the means to become capitalists.

>Let alone with the stereotypes Marx depended upon for his arguments?

Marx called these types of people that make enough money to own their own means of production "petit bourgeoisie". This is in contrast to the "haute bourgeoisie".

This isn't some exception to Marxist thought; this is literally one of the core components of Marxist thought.

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"Karl Marx and other Marxist theorists used the term petite bourgeoisie to academically identify the socio-economic stratum of the bourgeoisie that consists of small shopkeepers and self-employed artisans.

The petite bourgeoisie is economically distinct from the proletariat social-class strata who rely entirely on the sale of their labour-power for survival. It is also distinct from the capitalist class haute bourgeoisie, defined by owning the means of production and thus deriving most of their wealth from buying the labour-power of the proletariat..."

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The critical distinction being that they aren't 'selling their labor-power' to others.

And I just don't see how one can claim this makes any sense in modern times! Proles selling their 'labor power' are out-earning the bougies, anybody (even relatively low wage workers) can hire the 'labor-power of the proletariat' with things like Fiverr (amongst many others). And basically everybody owns the most valuable means of production in modern society - a computer. If you don't, you can buy one with a day or so of minimum wage work.

For that matter bougies in modern times don't make wealth their from buying labor power - they mostly just dump money into investments, bonds, and other such financial vessels. Bonds right now are at near 5%! And again the distinctions really fail because the same is also true of retail investors with a a Robin Hood or whatever.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie

Investments into what? Businesses?

Businesses that have employees? Employees that are selling their labour? Who are they selling their labour to?

No, they generally are not. There is obviously overlap, as there was in Marx's time, in income, but that’s not a problem with the theory—class isn’t about income but mode of participation in the economy.

> For that matter bougies in modern times don't make wealth their from buying labor power - they mostly just dump money into investments, bonds, and other such financial vessels.

The “financial vessels” are instruments of other entities, most of which exist by rented labor power.

> And again the distinctions really fail because the same is also true of retail investors with a a Robin Hood or whatever.

The distinctions have never been hard lines. In the most simplistic analysis class is determined by the predominant mode of interaction with the economy, while a more nuanced view sees class membership as essentially a fuzzy membership function, depending on the degree to which one interacts in the manner (selling labor to capitalists vs applying your own labor to your own capital vs. owning capital to which rented labor is applied) archetypical of a given class (both these modes of a analysis have been around for quite a while, thougj the fuzzy membership function language would only be used fairly recently.)

We can challenge this assertion by reductio ad absurdum. Imagine somehow all bougies earned less than all workers. Everything Marx said would be absolutely and completely nonsensical. There's nothing inherently impossible about such a world existing and it makes clear the point that income levels do absolutely matter. And in Marx's time I think it is fairly safe to say there would have been exactly 0 proles earning more than bougies. The concept of a 'factory' worker earning more than a factory owner would have been entirely alien to him, and most of the world, until fairly recently.

The most paradoxical thing about all of this is that the people most drawn to Marxist stuff are disproportionately in tech, the exact sort who, in many cases, already earn more than many, and likely most, business owners, work far fewer hours, and generally have dramatically nicer working conditions. I think it's mostly misidentified discontent. It's not the economic system that's at fault, but somehow building things in the digital world is fundamentally unsatisfying and unfulfilling, even if you get drowned in money, massages, bean bag chairs, and ping pong tables.

If people want fulfilling lives (so far as work as concerned) don't work in ad-tech. If you want stupid amounts of money work in ad-tech. You get the stupid amounts of money precisely because the work is awful and empty. It's a rather dramatically different world from Marx's time where, in general, work was awful and compensation was awful.

I mean, it wouldn't, if they still exercised power. But...they don't, while there is overlap on the boundaries, the classes defined by modes of interaction do, across every capitalist economy (including modern mixed economies, which are not the same system as the capitalism that Marx named and addressed, but share important features with it) form on aggregate hierarchy of both power and income in the same order that as the heirarchy of power Marx describes them in, even though the ranges of individual incomes overlap.

> And in Marx's time I think it is fairly safe to say there would have been exactly 0 proles earning more than bougies.

No, definitely the most well-paid person-living-by-rented labor would have had a higher income than the least-successful owner of capital to which rented labor applied. Capitalists (then no less than now) are capable of losing money continuously, eventually reaching the point where they fall out of the bourgeoisie entirely, and even among those that are more fortunate than that, there would have been many who were technically haut bourgeois because they relied primarily on renting others labor to apply to their capital, and many more who were petit bourgeois and applying their own labor to their own capital--like homesteaders with small holdings--who would earn less the most successful hired experts.

> It's a rather dramatically different world from Marx's time where, in general, work was awful and compensation was awful.

Yes, in modern mixed economies the condition of the median worker is better than in the capitalism of Marx's time, but, in general, work is awful and compensation is awful. Sure, the small percentage of the workers in well-compensated positions like the ad-tech you point to may do amazingly well -- but that's a minute fraction of workers.

Factor in the fact that a business owner is going to be working far more hours on average, than a 'worker', and it turns out that we do live live in this apparently not-so-hypothetical world where proles make more than bougies if we just define classes by their 'modes of economic interaction'! We can argue/nitpick the specifics in Marx's time, but I don't think you can claim in good faith that the situation was even remotely like this, and his logic was largely based on the conditions that he lived in. Even the most fundamental concepts like means of production are obsolete because in modern times everybody owns the most valuable (by a very wide margin) means of production.

And the pleasure or pain of labor is always relative to itself. For most people there's about a million things they'd rather be doing than working (including for business owners), but everybody has to put food on the plate and in modern times that's so much more pleasant an endeavor that it can't really be overstated, and this applies even to relatively recent times. When I, and I assume you, were growing up don't you remember getting endlessly spammed on TV with the non-stop 'Hurt on the job? Call Mr. Ambulance Chaser at 123-4567 today, and get what you deserve!'

[1] - https://altline.sobanco.com/small-business-revenue-statistic...

Just quoting from Wikipedia:

>Han argues that subjects become self-exploiters: "Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself."[12] The individual has become what Han calls "the achievement-subject"; the individual does not believe they are subjugated "subjects" but rather "projects: Always refashioning and reinventing ourselves" which "amounts to a form of compulsion and constraint—indeed, to a "more efficient kind of subjectivation and subjugation." As a project deeming itself free of external and alien limitations, the "I" subjugates itself to internal limitations and self-constraints, which are taking the form of compulsive achievement and optimization.[13]

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Also I suppose you make a reference to software DRM like Widevine L3 vs L1 (same thing for PlayReady SL2000 vs SL3000) which is not exactly Firefox vs Chrome. Firefox has even be known to work on the availability of hardware DRM on windows right now, (through the Media Foundation API I think?).

In the worst scenarios seen right now for example seen on services like Netflix, would be to only have lower qualities (e.g. 480p max) on browsers with only Software DRM available (like firefox) and encrypt better qualities with keys only available when there is hardware DRM available. Though I'm not sure YouTube would go that far for now? Netflix, Amazon and such have contracts with right-holders stating those protections as a requirement, but YouTube does not have (IMO thankfully) the same kind of relation and contract with "Youtubers".

I think that what YouTube wants to do for now is to greatly lower the amount of people not watching contents through its website/app (and thus not seeing ads). I would even think that this is mostly not about yt-dlp users, but more the huge amount of people relying on some Youtube-to-mp3 website or similar accessible tools. Here enforcing software DRM would be enough to at least temporarily break all those tools and force those users to go back on the platform I guess, and maybe you can also sue some tools' developers once there is an "encryption breaking"-mechanism embedded in it (IANAL)?

It does with the music labels, which is why said labels sued various YouTube downloaders for bypassing a technical protection measure in regards to the existing rolling cypher (but reading between the lines I suspect the labels intention was actually to lose that case, and then take that judgement to YouTube to show that they were in breach of the contract that required them to include some form of technical protection measure and hence adopt Widevine on all music streams).

Among other things, that would very likely be the end of yt-dlp being hosted on Github and maybe even being distributed via apt repositories, pip, homebrew etc.

Maybe we can swap out "think" with "experience consciousness"