Reddit is sending strongly-worded messages to moderators of certain subreddits that are marked as NSFW (Not Safe For Work), telling them to remove the tag or face being removed.
When forced to make a choice between power or their principles, Reddit moderators are overwhelmingly choosing to abandon the latter.
That’s not really fair. I mean, it is for some, but for most of us, we’re just caught in a shitty situation.
I mod (or modded, I suppose) for a medium-sized city subreddit, and it’s used for things like news about missing persons, job openings, safety hazards, special events, and so on. Things that are of interest to the actual, physical community. It’s an online mirror of our city that took years to develop.
That’s really hard to just abandon. At the same time, most of the mods were using RIF or Apollo to stay on top of spammers, trolls, scams, and other objectionable content, and now we’re stuck with either the half-baked, laggy, crash-prone nonsense of the official app, or the desktop website.
Neither is any good for properly moderating a busy, active subreddit from a phone. It can’t be done.
So mods who care about their communities are trying their best to hold them together while finding a way to protest these changes, and it sucks for everyone involved.
And a lot are working on leaving Reddit and trying to build communities here on Lemmy instead.
Reddit is dying now. It’s going to be slow, and it’s going to involve mods trying to save their communities for a while, but I don’t think anything is really going to save it from this mortal, self-inflicted wound. Give it time… Lemmy is getting better daily, while Reddit is getting worse. And cut the mods who care more about their communities than they do about the specific platform those communities reside on some slack. It’s a shitty situation all around.
I wish people would take a more subtle approach. Have a pinned post saying that mods have moved the community to the lemmy one with the link, and have a bot reply to new posts saying the community has shifted and how to post there with a few linked resources. I’ve seen this strategy used successfully in many subreddits to get people to discord or some other platform.
I remember when the female dating strategy sub did this rather successfully.
They were about to get banned anyway for the incel-like behaviour and took it upon themselves to switch platforms.
My dude, what is your thing? All of your comments consist of variations on “ribbit” and yet… you do not appear to be a frog.
Are they really? They dedicate their free time to give reddit their power. Reddit is now yelling at them to give power back to themselves despiteb years of saying the opposite.
Oh, no! Not being removed from a voluntary unpaid job that saves Reddit millions every year!
*Removes NSFW tags, places NSFW content anyway.
As I understand it, the sub being flagged NSFW as a whole means Reddit can’t sell ads on it, whereas general subs with NSFW content are considered fine (like AskReddit, where “what’s the sexiest sex you’ve ever sexed?” comes up about twice a week). The subs would need to be flooded with NSFW content that is upvoted above anything SFW for several days and a campaign to highlight this to advertisers to effect change in this way, and I’m sure the admins would yell at them before it got that far and the moderators would crumble again.
Oh no. Who will I work for free then?
Doesn’t fuck spez know the meaning of the word volunteer? Mods Don’t depend on reddit, is the other way around.
Mods are like game devs, the powers that be know they can treat them like absolute shit because there is an endless supply of replacements who are willing to be treated like shit for the opportunity to do the work.
That is untrue. Reddit would do just fine without their mods. Mods dont moderate subreddits out of the goodness of their heart to volunteer their time. They do it because they like having power over their communities. Reddit is threatening to take away that power from them, which is why they all crumbled so fast. It is unbelievably easy to find new people to take power over an internet community.
The fact that reddit keeps making threats to moderators instead of taking immediate action is interesting. I guess they realize they’d be screwed without all that volunteer labor.
