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Reddit Users Heckle Search for New Mods, as Some Mods Move to Lemmy and Discord (arstechnica.com) 73

Posted by EditorDavid from the moderation-in-all-things dept.
"Over the past week, a Reddit employee has posted to subreddits with ousted mods, asking for new volunteers," reports Ars Technica.

But it's not always going smoothly... A Reddit employee going by ModCodeofConduct (Reddit has refused to disclose the real names of admins representing the company on the platform) has posted to numerous subreddits over recent days, including r/IRLEasterEggs, r/donthelpjustfilm, r/ActLikeYouBelong, r/malefashionadvice, and r/AccidentalRenaissance... Like most official Reddit posts since the API war began, the comments under the job ads display users' discontent.

"May I nominate a mod? I think u/ConspirOC would be a great mod, as he created this subreddit and has successfully run it for years, before you forcibly removed him," a user going by LittleManOnACan wrote on ModCodeofConduct's post seeking replacement r/IRLEasterEggs mods. "Additionally, fire Steve Huffman (Fuck u/Spez)."

There's also a desire among Reddit users for a return to not just how things were but an acknowledgment of the efforts made by many previous moderators, how things changed, and why things are different now. A Redditor going by QuicklyThisWay wrote on ModCodeofConduct's post for news mods for r/IRLEasterEggs:

"Just to be clear for anyone 'applying' to be a moderator. The user that created the subreddit and any other mods were removed by admins for making the community private. Even though the option to change to private is available to all subreddits at any time, the admins have not and will not respect any 'autonomy' moderators appear to have...

As Ars has previously detailed, user protests didn't prevent third-party Reddit apps from closing. However, they have disrupted the platform.

Reddit didn't answer questions Ars sent about its replacement mod criteria or how it'll help ensure new mods can properly handle their newfound volunteer duties...
"mods Ars has spoken with over the weeks have frequently pointed to the potential for burnout, death threats, long training sessions (from other volunteer mods), and rapid turnover for Reddit mods..." the article notes, adding "Without mods proven to be dedicated and experienced, it's unclear how fervently such efforts will continue in the future...

"Disgruntled mods and ex-mods continue seeking new platforms to continue community discussions, including Lemmy and Discord. And as of this writing, there are still 1,900 subreddits private, per the Reddark_247 tracker."

Meanwhile, the third annual edition of Reddit's annual pixel-placing event r/Place "turned into a battleground for dunking on the CEO," reports Polygon. A Reddit spokesperson declined to comment about this year's edition of r/Place, telling Polygon via email "redditors are going to reddit."
Gizmodo's article includes a timelapse video (from YouTube) that they say captures "the whimsy — and anger — of its users," including "plenty of protest art directed at CEO Steve Huffman, who goes by u/spez on the platform..." While there are plenty of examples of "Fuck Spez" to go around, the most creative moment occurred at the end of the project. As r/Place wound to a close, users were able to place a pixel once every thirty seconds, but the pixel had to be white — an effort to wipe the slate clean. However, in the final moments of the project, users collaborated to leave one massive "FUCK SPEZ" across the canvas.
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Reddit Users Heckle Search for New Mods, as Some Mods Move to Lemmy and Discord More

Reddit Users Heckle Search for New Mods, as Some Mods Move to Lemmy and Discord

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  • Getting rid of them was the right move

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It's endlessly amusing to see the Reddit mods go to an old slogan from the_donald, but I tend to think there are no good guys in this fight.

      The mods are hot garbage on almost any sub of note, though it's also funny that the only subs here are practically unknowns. I mean the biggest one here is male fashion advice and although there are a number of people using it, it's not something you generally see on the front page. The other subs are, though apparently large, still pretty far down there.

      So it reads l

      • Re:Mods ruined reddit (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Sunday July 30, 2023 @07:35AM (#63725182)

        Being a moderator always means you're the bad guy. Much like the referee on the pitch, you're the one to blame for everything. Because with the very same decision you make you're a pushover anyone can push around as they please and Hitler incarnate that wants to crush everyone under his boot if they don't roll over. Of course to different people and sides in the argument.

        Why anyone wants to have that position is beyond me. I sure as fuck don't.

        • Well put. Damned either if you do or don't. Plus, Reddit management have clearly shown that they don't give a fuck.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Ksevio ( 865461 )

          It's come up a lot more that most people don't want the job. Even before the protests the owners of some subs were saying calls for new mods were only getting a few replies and maybe only 1 serious one. It's a shitty job that's a lot of work and little appreciation

          • I know. Back in the days, when the internet was young and so was I, I was moderator for a board. It was back in the days when the trolls were a bit more sophisticated (or so blatantly stupid that they already signed up with some variant of "adolph hitler" as their user name) and the state actor astrotufers weren't really a thing yet (yes, THAT long ago it was).

            And even back then it was already playing Blue Helmet on the Golan Heights. Both sides accused you of siding with their "enemy", nobody took any subt

    • Re:Mods ruined reddit (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Chiasmus_ ( 171285 ) on Saturday July 29, 2023 @10:59PM (#63724788) Journal

      When you say "Well, we're not going to pay you in money, but we *will* pay you in the power to throw your weight around, declare the supremacy of your own ideology, and ruin people's days"... ...well, what kind of person do you *think* is going to be attracted to that position?

      • You may be nothing in real life but you can be the strongman/woman of your dreams on reddit! Plus we get free labor from you.

      • The old mods?

        Quite frankly, that wouldn't change much. What will be the thing that changes much is that the people who will get hired now are the same people the old mods rejected when they applied to them.

        My guess would be that their preferred narrative clashed with that of the old mods. And thus that of the regulars. Which in turn pretty much means that we will soon see a /r/the_real_$insertoldsubnamehere

    • idk, the more I hear the more I think the whole fucking thing is rotten. Maybe not all of it, but enough that it's creeping me out. I'm watching many subreddits and it's obvious people are gaming the fuck out of the voting system, which means money/bots and people looking the other way.

      The voting system is supposed to keep bullshit quiet not elevate it to the top if you pay for it.

      • i.e. fucking UFO's. Lost count of how many 'new' UFO/alien subs keep popping up in my feed, and I keep muting them, but more different one's keep coming.

        • That and using random subreddits to frontpage political memes, pointless meme subreddits like /meirl.

          The new zeitgeist is just random number subreddits, which are targeted at the youngest users

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
          A now I start understanding why I never tend to see the bad side of reddit (lucky me right)
          1: I'm on a where few generally non-controversial subs
          2: I seldom use the main page
          3: I view everything in reverse chronological order (newest on top) apart from comments that i prefer reading oldest on top
          Point 3 kind of insulates me from the voting problems as it makes votes irrelevant for sorting and I've never notice messages being obviously hidden. This might go a long way in explaining my posts here on slas

          • Yeah it's probably because I'm subbed to r/Conservative, so it thinks I'm a lunatic and feeds me the appropriate subs. To be fair, lunacy is about all that exists in that sub, so guess I deserve it.

      • All voting/karma systems are riggable and end up amount to fascism by suppressing the voice of the minority opinion.

      • Hey! Don't badmouth The Reddit Game or I'll find out your username and play the "get the weenie of the week banned" minigame with you!

  • just pull the plug already and turn off the lights on the way out

  • Free economic analysis (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nuntius ( 92696 ) on Saturday July 29, 2023 @10:56PM (#63724784)

    Assuming $40 / hr, 7 hr / week, 52 weeks / year, 1 mod / sub, and 2000 subs, I estimate moderators provided at least $29M of free labor to Reddit each year. It takes a sizeable paid content team to replace a single passionate expert. The API revenue had better be a lot higher to risk spoiling the whole show.

    Reddit was interesting because people used it to organize interesting conversations. Web forums are everywhere but Reddit had community. The owners seem think their platform is more important than the community. I remember what was and look forward to a better future. Maybe variations of Eternal September are destined to recur.

    • >Web forums are everywhere but Reddit had community.

      I would disagree with that. A "community" is, at mininimum, a group of people who know who each other are.

      Reddit is a "forum" that would never fit into any physical forum. To them, everyone is just another anonymous asshole. Banning any given one of them has no meaning, because in ten minutes, another will fill their place.

      • On the larger subs, sure. On smaller subs, regulars know the other regulars. On local subs, there's even real life people behind the names you might know. One of our city council members posts there, some business owners, and we're talking about local things we all have a frame of reference for, like the latest water main break, the fuck is going on at___? etc.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
        this is Redits problem, reddit is not su much a thing as a community/forum hosting site, but since it's all hosted under the reddit domain and most subs loook the same (ui wise) it is so much easier to think of everything on reddit as being the same stuff, rather than the 1000s of disparate plogs hosted on blogspot etc.

    • Re:Free economic analysis (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Saturday July 29, 2023 @11:15PM (#63724796)

      I'd go a bit lower on the wages - moderating a sub is a basic cube slave job even if it shouldn't be. Go with a bit over the local minimum wage and then outsource to whatever country has an available workforce with the lowest wages. Doesn't matter if the resulting work is garbage.

      Your estimate is still wildly low because it's far more than 1 mod / sub by the time you get to a decent size (Reddit has 500 sub-forums with over 1m subscribers), and for a 24/7 site you're going to need 24/7 service even if it is understaffed during the day and grossly understaffed at night.

      • Go with a bit over the local minimum wage and then outsource to whatever country has an available workforce with the lowest wages.

        Better option: Just nuke the sub. People seem to think that all of reddit is dependent on a handful of subs. They aren't. It's like saying if slashdot.com suddenly went offline the internet would fail. It won't. A few people who visited only Slashdot would lose interest but the majority would just keep on internetting on all the other sites that are still online. The overwhelming megamajority of subs are online and have moderators in them.

        Subs are community made. If they are deleted and someone thought they

    • Assuming $40 / hr, 7 hr / week, 52 weeks / year, 1 mod / sub, and 2000 subs, I estimate moderators provided at least $29M of free labor to Reddit each year.

      Mods provided no labour to Reddit. Subreddits are created as a community interest project by an interested community, not by Reddit. They aren't Reddit. You can wipe all of these 2000 subs and one of two things will happen:
      a) nothing, life goes on among the million of subreddits currently existing.
      b) someone misses the sub and re-registers it instantly becoming a mod for his now new own personal project.

      The idea that Reddit owes money to mods is like saying that web developers own money to ISP/hosting providers for writing the websites they host. That's not the business relationship here even if Reddit / ISPs / Hosts benefit from the existence of people using their service to attract other people.

  • Reddit's quality in moderation and discourse has gone down the toilet. The pettiness of mods and the up/down voting system feels more like junior high kids run amok than adults running things. Reddit admins do nothing to reign in abuses. The only time reddit takes action is if the press pushes them.

    • I've seen this post before, 10 years ago. Reddit is still here. I suspect after reading your post I will reflect back on it in 10 years on a reddit post.

  • If I understand this correctly, part of the problem is 3rd party apps that are being locked out. These apps are important because the official app is not easy to use.

    So why don't Reddit's owners just buy out the publisher of the app that the moderators like to use?

    • Or they could just write a better app?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      They are not being looked out, if the developers think their users find their apps useful enough they are free to start financing the new API fees by selling said users a subscription to finance said fess. The API is still avalable, and (I might be wrong on this) there might even be a free teer with n unrequest/month so that developers can get started cost free and get rolling until their app becomes so populat it exceeds the free teer allowance.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        When you triple the access cost, you're locking out those who can't pay for access. This was a lot more than tripling the cost of access to the API.

        So I think it's fair to say that the apps are being locked out.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
        Tea HiThere pointed out where I was wrong, and ofc he/she/rgem is perfectly right, I forgot about that, at any rate my original post was not intended as a troll, so sorry thar it appeared thar way.
  • Did all these mods seriously use the API's or rely on them to the level of drama they created over this? Makes no sense..
    • Hmm, so all this is over a 3rd party app that reddit mods like to use? Why didn't reddit just provide custom API keys for their mods to let them use whatever 3rd party app they want? This whole situation and how long its dragged out is surlrising.
    • The hard ball attitude from management, being called landed gentry, plus no willingness to compromise and poorer mod tools mean it isn't all that weird.

    • I'd think by now it's way, way past that. Reddit showed the mods that they can take away pretty much anything they consider dear and valuable as they please, and, well, that doesn't exactly sit well with them.

      Be honest, how'd you react?

      • Be honest, how'd you react?

        I think many of us are just sitting here on the sidelines munching on popcorn.

        Playground owner vs Bully Squatters - news at 11.

        • Guess it's less bully squatters. If you want to do a playground analogy, what you got here was a bunch of hobbyist teams playing for fun, shits and giggles and letting the playground owners collect the ticket income in exchange for having a place to play. Now the terms of using the pitch change and the teams get pissed because they somehow thought that they had some sort of deal with the playground owner when they didn't.

          But I agree, I like this game a lot more. Pass the popcorn, here's your soda.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        People put up with that kind of thing all the time. Yeah, it's very unpleasant, but if you just don't think about it, you can ignore it until it happens.

        OTOH, IF the moderators are important, and IF they depend on tools that are no longer available, THEN they're going to stop working or go somewhere else. And if so, then Reddit is going to need to replace them. And that will have associated expenses.

        Now I don't know if those hypotheticals are true or not. Various folks have chimed in on various sides of

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Ksevio ( 865461 )

      Basically from what I've seen, Reddit's own spam protection is pretty terrible so in order to keep up with spam bots posting porn links and scams, mods rely on bots to keep an eye on things round the clock.

  • "Disgruntled mods and ex-mods continue seeking new platforms to continue community discussions, including Lemmy and Discord.

    Reddit had better find a way to gruntle them, then.

  • Over an internet discussion forum. Itâ(TM)s a chat forum. A structure as old as the internet itself and based on what gotta be a few thousand lines of code, max. Somehow Reddit managed to build an entire frikkin multibillion dollar business around one of these, which is hilarious and I salute them as they laugh all the way to the bank. But its an easily copied structure and the gig is probably up for this one. Itll limp along but their days of minting ad money is probably over.

  • The parade of horribles didn't happen. In fact, mods got their feelings hurt when discussions about this quickly turned into a conversation over what a shitty job mods had done on said communities and how many didn't believe their parade of horribles.

    It's business as usual and any article about this non-issue is clearly from a source whose employees are mods. Mods aren't unpaid labor... they're people scamming their day job (coughcough FDA) which is why the potential breaking of mobile support is the _re

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