Dear person volunteering your time and effort for what you thought was a worthy endeavor. We’re trying to commodify your work so we can make a killing so don’t fuck it up for us.
Dear Spez,
I’ve learned that Reddit wants to profit from my content. I’ve therefore decided to monetize my content going forward. I have very reasonable rates of $50 USD per post. $75 USD for long posts.
I’m willing to discuss this with Reddit but these rates are nonnegotiable.
This
“we respect the protests, but we will remove everyone that will protest”
the part “decide that don’t want to be a mod anymore” is so infuriating and unrespectful. Like they don’t know what’s goin on…
Actually, as a mod, that’s the strongest action you could take… stop moderating for free for reddit. “Jun 12, 2023 When they’re all functioning normally, Reddit boasts nearly 140,000 active subreddits at any given time” according to https://wegotthiscovered.com/social-media/how-many-subreddits-are-on-reddit/ Now imagine 1 in 10 subreddits were abandoned by their mods. That’s 14,000 subreddits without moderation. Let Spez take over the role of the Landed Gentry for 14,000 subreddits. If he thinks he’s not making money now, how much will he have to pay to take care of all those subreddits?
As much as I agree with you, I have to disagree as well. In the short term they would have to pay their staff to mod those pages. But for how long will it take for them to find another sucker of a mod to do it for free?
Yes it would cost them money but it would not be for long.
But for how long will it take for them to find another sucker of a mod to do it for free?
Modding, especially on larger subs, is a PITA and takes way more time than most people think. You can always find users who say they will do it but in my experience with across several 1M+ subs most new mods will either drop out or go inactive in 3 weeks or less.
Less popular subs in the 250k user range will sometimes only get 1 or 2 volunteers and sometimes no one at all.
It isn’t nearly as easy to replace moderators as you’re making it out to be.
I do agree with you. It could take a while for them to find someone to mod any sub. I was not trying to be too specific with how long. Just that eventually they will find someone to do it. I probably should have been more clearer about that. It was just was my 2 cents.
Probably a bribe of free reddit coins or a Reddit+ subscription for being a scab.
Why bother doing that when an AI will do it
This might actually be the reason they started this.
That would make the decision even more short sighted.
It won’t end with AI moderation, It will end with moderation that is very exploitable, bad to adjust to all subreddits and because of this whole mess they will drive community engagement into the ground. And that is without even so much as taking a peak on the possible affects to the IPO. It’s gonna be mess, even if the platform survives.
The AI that media is talking about generating text that looks very much like what a human would write. There might be other AI capable of moderating, but this is not it.
The LLM could be used to pretend there are users if one day they would go somewhere else.
That’s slippery. Pay one mod, and no more mods will be willing to work for free anymore. The only reason a mod was seen as a volunteer position is because there was an overall informal agreement that the community collectively owned the subreddit, its activity and its content. Reddit just made it very clear that they think the corporation owns the content, and the users that produce the content in the subreddits. The facade is gone, pay one mod and Reddit unravels even faster.
Spez is a narcissist. Why give him your labor for free?
Sure, they may get another sucker to do it for free, why be a narcissist’s sucker?
If he’s abused these mods, he’ll abuse those mods. And yes, he could get AI to do this, but then again, years ago* (Steve H became CEO in 2015) we were promised a better Reddit app. Like the music business, Reddit is constantly losing money, unwilling to change, but still around.
*I would link it, but for some reason, U/Spez’s history stops 3 years ago. I’m sure it’s a Reddit glitch that will be fixed just like the better Reddit app that’s waiting for us under the rainbow.
have fun scaling
Subreddits belong to the community of users…
Spez, read that again. Slower this time.
It’s not even true though. Subreddits belong to the user who creates it, they become the top mod and delegate to other mods. If users don’t like how a subreddit is moderated, they are free to make their own subreddit - they aren’t supposed to take over someone else’s subreddit.
This is the fundamental shift that reddit is trying to make right now. Subs no longer belong to you, and if you “misbehave” (displease reddit) they’ll gladly move what they now consider to be their thing to someone else.
Legally they might even be in their rights. But if they actually follow through they’ll soon need paid mods or they’ll only have unsuccessful psychopaths for mods.
I’m not so sure about that. I’m no lawyer, but I do know that there’s a lot of legal precedent for allowing people/things to operate a certain way, like land use. However, technology is still new to the legal system that’s set in the 1800s.
Communist Country Citizens: First time?
Fuck em. This is my first post on Lemmy and I’m happy it exists.
Does that also mean your first word on Lemmy is “fuck”?
Just spoke to @Tamhenk’s parents, fuck was their first word in general.
It’s how they were made too!
it’s fucks all the way down
😏
Damn emoticons are bad style, here on redd…
ah.
Nevermind.
all of us are fucks
Reddit: “Subreddits are for the community of reddit users who rely on them.”
Community of reddit users: “We think the sub should stay private, and if you force it open, we’ll spam sexy John Oliver and porn.”
Reddit: “wait no not like that”
This message is mind-blowingly tone deaf.
It’s not tone deaf so much as it’s gaslighting. Their intention isn’t to get compliance or work through any of the valid concerns - their intention seems to be to cover themselves and give plausible deniability for potential investors.
They’re sending this to mods as if they are the audience, which we know is not the case since anything the mods say is not actually considered.
Except that’s not always what’s happening. A couple subs I’m in have voted to reopen, when they’ve had the ability to vote at all (since it’s hard to vote when the subreddit is locked).
One voted to reopen and the mods removed the poll and are pretending it went their way despite some people having screenshots of the poll.
I love the condescension here - your protest is “taking a break from moderating”
It’s corporate rhetoric.
They define the reality they want their audience (press, investors) to see: No protests, no demands, no conflict with Reddit, just moderators not taking their job seriously while Reddit is taking its communities seriously and reaching out in good faith and with empathy.
Then they go all method actor and assume this reality, and start writing.
All that lazy “landed gentry” no longer volunteering their time and labor.
Subreddits belong to the community of users…
So you’re providing tools to allow democratic control of subreddits, right?
Right?
I mean, one of the subreddits just gave all subscribers to it mod status. I think it was political humor. Something like 1 million people are now mods for that subreddit.
If you set a few AutoModerator rules, you can make everyone a moderator.
Pure chaos. It’s brilliant.
One of the other admins said they hadn’t talked about that in an interview shortly after spez said that.
So once again he’s talking out both sides of his mouth.
… and other orifices
You have the right to decide which hand your mind control chip gets installed on.
Moderating is volunteer work. *Spez exhibits unlikeable characteristics. Why volunteer for someone who exhibits unlikeable characteristics?
*Edited from “Spez is a narcissist. Why volunteer for a narcissist?”
“Narcissist” is a psychological term describing a person with NPD, a disability in ego regulation. There is no evidence that Spez is disabled, neurodivergent, or otherwise mentally disordered. Even if he did suffer from ego disability, there are plenty of good reasons to hate him, and hating someone for being disabled is a bad reason. Comments like this one contribute to the stigma faced by mentally disordered people.
OK; he has such a need for control that he modified toxic comments directed at him.
On November 23, 2016, a member of a subreddit dedicated to Donald Trump, /r/The_Donald, posted evidence indicating that Reddit administrators had modified multiple user comments inside the subreddit. Following this post, Huffman took responsibility for the comment modifications, writing, “Our community team is pretty pissed at me, so I most assuredly won’t do this again.” His administrative modifications involved changing one specific insulting phrase, in several comments, to make them appear as if the insults were directed toward the moderators of the subreddit instead of him.
https://gizmodo.com/reddit-ceo-caught-secretly-editing-user-comments-chatl-1789342358
You might not like Ellen Pao, but it’s funny that the NBA sided with her comments against him in 2020:
When moderators protested in 2023, Spez compared them to Landed Gentry.
“And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”
Reddit was founded in 2005. In January of 2008, Reddit decides to let users create their own custom reddits, or subreddits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Reddit
So the Landed Gentry are from 2008 + (15 years). How many Parent-to-child hand-offs can you really expect in that time?
He belittles volunteers (moderators). He has manipulated the site. He is currently scrubbing the site of disparaging comments about himself now.
https://lemmy.world/post/392621
He is not someone to volunteer your services for. Moderation is like gardening. It’s a never-ending activity of pulling weeds.
You listed a lot of great reasons to hate Spez, and none of them are that he’s disabled. I said in my comment that there are plenty of good reasons to hate Spez, and that hating him for being disabled is a bad reason. It seems like we fundamentally agree on the premise that Spez is a garbage dickbag, and why. Since we agree so strongly, maybe you could edit your top level comment to remove the part where you call him a narcissist. That way we can focus on bad things that he’s done rather than an alleged disability.
Narcissism has existed long before the DSM. I’m not certain why it should be inferred that someone is disabled or have NPD if they are simply a narcissist.
Because the term “narcissist” entered the public discourse as a shorthand for “person with narcissistic personality disorder”, and that’s what pop psychologists, self help book writers, and lifestyle gurus mean when they say narcissist. That’s where the word’s use in pop culture comes from. It refers to a person with an ego disability.
Ok, I have edited my comment to “*Spez exhibits unlikeable characteristics. Why volunteer for someone who exhibits unlikeable characteristics?” better now?
Thanks
Because I’m sure all those people aren’t volonteering for spez but rather the subs users, the ones that keep their communities alive because of their shared interests.
“Reopen this, or else!”
But they’re carefully avoiding to say or else what. My guess is every next step option would cost them resources at the scale of subreddits they’re reaching out to, so they’re hoping that the empty threat alone will cause some to relent without costing them anything. Right?
What’s there to take? Like, these guys are working for free running on their enthusiasm and passion. You make them question whether the community is really worth their time, even if they relent for now, how does that do reddit any good? It isn’t like reddit has any actual power over the mods on their ultimate decision of quiting.
Unfortunately, from what I’m seeing in a lot of subs, it’s working. You do have protests from places like r/aww and r/pics doing the John Oliver thing, and r/Steam posting about literal steam. But it seems like on the large, threats of people losing their ability to give Reddit free labor is working to get subs back open.
Edit: r/pics changed, they’ve chosen total anarchy.
They are slowly snowballing but it’s accelerating. Once a certain amount of people leaves or stops interacting altogether, the site bleeds activity and dies. Roughly 2% of people who went on Reddit were responsible for some 90% of the content. 50% of people browsed without an account (you want those because they’re the eyeballs ad are meant for) and the rest were lurkers who occasionally commented. That means if that even half of that 2% of content creators leave, there’s no more content for the rest of the users to see or interact with. Once they leave, all lurkers leave. None of the lurkers are going to take up posting to Reddit, modding or create an account. They will just close the tab and move on to something else. That’s the snowball that’s coming.
(Numbers are roughly remembered from an old analysis of Reddit traffic, but they’re consistent with almost all social media)
I did not know it was so low. That’s crazy. It makes sense though. I don’t know anyone who posts in real life. All the people I know who use Reddit are just lurkers.
I was a prolific poster for years. In the end it just felt like screaming into the void.
Just think in terms of the not ‘in your face’ subs. Memes/pics and such were easy to make a post and it either goes up or goes down, but most other subs would need a little more thought/time for a post to be made.
I was a member of a 2-4 million subreddit, and I think there were only about 20-40 posts a day. Some repetitive posts were removed by the mod bot that you would occasionally see, so maybe a few more than those 20-40, but even the most prolifically engaged-with comment sections would max out around 400 comments.
Responding solely to move from Reddit lurker to a Lemmy contributor… this is literally the secret right here… join the revolution, hit the effing reply button, y’all…
Okay, reply button hit. Now what?
Do we get party hats?
No, but you get a reply from a different stranger and that’s the microdose of dopamine we all live for.
livin’ for those brain slushies
Hey I am sorry you have to learn it this way, but yes, you do get a party hat too. I got my right here.
Please don’t attack me personally like this
/s
If we did, we could be rich in RuneScape
On a sunny day walking on a trail, one can’t help but to contemplate all they are going to do when they are out of the woods and back home. By that point all they are going to remember is the thinly veiled threat. They are not going to last long.
Reddit was fun. That was really the only thing everyone need and everyone want. All the utilities that comes with the scale is just derivatives. With the way they decide to go forward, modding for reddit will never be fun ever again.
They’d most likely take over at least the frontpage subs. They could hire contractors for dirt cheap from the far corners of the world and it would probably be good enough.
A few days ago I didn’t have a single reason to leave reddit. Yet, with so many reasons now, here I am, and I look forward to lemmy and kbin.
Ditto. I wasn’t happy but I thought they’d find some sort of compromise since being reddit, the replacement for Digg 2.0, they’d surely understand they can’t just be complete twats about it. Then they started denigrating/banning their own mods… Wtf?
There are still a few niche subs I’ll have to keep using reddit for for now, but for everything else I’m happy to move on. I’ll also be cancelling my reddit monthly subscription, obviously.
They have forgotten the faces of their fathers. The entire reason people left Digg in the first place was because they tried to make ads unavoidable. And oh look that’s the entire reason Reddit is killing third party apps. They’re intent on dying the way Digg did, for the same reason.
/u/spez is a pain, and that is the truth.
If you used a credit card for your subscription fee, would going directly to your credit card company and doing a chargeback cause more chaos for Reddit? Instead of politely canceling your sub and asking for a refund? Chargebacks are a PITA for accounts receivable.
It would have been so easy, just add some rules to 3rd party apps in exchange for reduced API charges.
Any middle ground would have sorted this out in a few days with minimal issues, now they are trying to put out an oil fire by throwing water at it.
There are still a few niche subs I’ll have to keep using reddit for for now
Id at least say stick to your guns. I left before the the blackout and haven’t been back since. It sucks because I’m missing GameDay threads for the Braves, and 1 or 2 niche subs I’d visit daily, but using it less is still using is.
im taking to Discord to replace gameday threads for me… honestly with how fast game day threads go its probably better.
Yeah, I ended up canceling my premium and I’m now using it to donate to lemmy / mastodon instances I’m migrating too. They (spez) has destroyed any (trust) chances of me going back too.
thats what annoys me. If reddit had came forward and said “API access is expensive, we need to be paid a reasonable fee for it, or we cant afford to continue”, i would have dontated, or paid for it.
But just saying “its insanely expensive, in 1 month”, and then attacking the mods just pisses people off.
lol, “subreddits belong to the community of users…” clearly doesn’t belong to the users. That’s the whole problem
This is why I left reddit, they say they care for the community. Only to use their actions to remove good moderators (maybe 1 or 2 bad ones in the process of this fire bombing of bans) and the nail in the coffin being u/spez doing more dumb decisions. Like doubling down on the API. . . Despite the protests and his app going downhill.
I like how we made fun of the mods, but all stood up for them.
They are our mods, only we can make fun of them XD.
Eddit:almost all
“Hey mod! Go back working for free so we can make money or we’ll take action you peasant. You own nothing. Kneel and obey.”
Steve Hoffman probably
"…we’ll take action you
peasantlanded gentry…FTFY
“Subreddits belong to the community of users”. Followed by "a path forward to make sure your subreddit is available… which is it?? lol
deleted by creator
Alright. They can hire some employees to moderate all of Reddit then.
Reddit doesn’t make enough revenue. Even if all posts were ads, it won’t be enough to pay minimum wage for all the staff necessary to mod just the protesting communities.
maybe spez should have thought about that before alienating arguably his most valuable users
“What do you mean the presents don’t want to work anymore?! That have to! They’re… They’re Pesents!”
- Probably spez
That’s even better then.
I wish them the best of luck
Open it back up and just stop moderating it? Make them mildly infuriated that you’re acting your wage.
It seems like that’s common at the moment, the amount of trash being let slide on Reddit is unreal. I’m not surprised at all.
