Will this undermine most of what makes IAmA special? Probably. But Reddit leadership has all the funds they need to hire people to perform those extra tasks we formerly undertook as volunteer moderators, and we’d be happy to collaborate with them if they choose to do so.
Maybe I’m already out of touch but who cares what reddit is doing?
It’s dead to me.
I wish I could have some less of it, at the moment though 90% of the posts on the fediverse are Reddit this, and Reddit that.
Post some other stuff please.
Welcome to !reddit. This is a community for all news and discussions about Reddit.
I would imagine everyone subscribed to !reddit does.
Problem is that I’m browsing the All filter until I find the right communities for me, so people like me inadvertently see these unwanted Reddit topic posts too 😕
I’m sure a lot of people are in the same boat as you as well. I know I am. I just meant to point out that a decent number of people do care considering how many people are subbed to !reddit.
I’ll admit I’m at least somewhat interested though, else I would have kept scrolling.
I’m all for compensating moderators but I think it should come with additional oversight, vetting, and higher expectations. There are many terrific moderators out there who absolutely deserve to be compensated for their efforts. However, there have been too many instances of power hungry mods who have had a negative effect on a community.
Either hire mods as employees so that they have oversight from management or make it so mods can be voted out. There needs to be some level of accountability.
For smaller communities it probably matters less, but as soon as you break a certain point it becomes a fair bit of work, even with bots.
I like the idea of voting mods out, but I think the bar should be rather high. If 2/3 of the other mods want a top mod out, definitely out them. With the community it’s a bit harder because for smaller communities that can be gamed with bots.
So, “we’ll still do some work for free, but not as much”? I can’t see Reddit caring about this ho hum response, and if they do notice it has a negative impact on the sub they’ll just replace them.
Scorched earth is the only way that moderators can exercise any real power at this point. Anything else is just impotent.
I think this take somewhat misses the point, but it’s one that’s seemed relatively prevalent among the Reddit refugees hitting fediverse.
There is a sentiment among many folks who left fairly immediately that wants Reddit to burn. That wants the mods and the users of the site to set the whole of Reddit on fire, add extra gas, and walk away. Nothing short of the most extreme, most dramatic, most explosive possible forms of protest are acceptable - otherwise the people you’re talking about are some combination of willing patsies, idiots, and/or feckless cowards.
Which is kind of … a big expectation. Most people who care enough about anything to protest about issues with that thing, are not going to turn around and maliciously destroy it if they don’t get their way.
The AMA mods built something cool and something impressive. They aren’t protesting because they’re part of the group that simply hates Reddit and hates Reddit Inc and wants to do as much harm as possible to both on their way out. They’re going to keep maintaining what they built, while allowing time and other users to demonstrate what Reddit was failing to value. That is, quite honestly, one of the most constructive forms of protest available.
AMA started off as an absolute dumpster-fire of drama, fakeposts, and weird self-promotion bullshit - they’re going to let it return to it’s natural state while making sure Admin has no legitimate reason to intervene and replace them.
Scorched earth is the only way that moderators can exercise any real power at this point. Anything else is just impotent.
In this case, what do you think “scorched earth” would be? A lot of these takes seem to kind of overestimate how much power mods have, relative to admin, in terms of effective protest methods. To me at least, simply hurling themselves on the proverbial sword to get removed as mods is probably going to a lot shorter in impact and a lot more of a hollow symbolic gesture than this. Deleting accounts and temporarily locking communities is both a self-silencing protest and not something that remains visible or has long-term impact on the site.
I think you’re dead-on.
In some ways a degraded system is much harder to fix (or even identify as broken) than an outright destroyed one.
If the IAmA mods vandalized the sub, they would get booted and replaced. But if they just stop doing anything but the bare minimum… that sub was such a magnet for traffic, it might slowly degrade traffic to Reddit as a whole.
But just looking at the data, it might be very very hard to figure out that what is driving that is the IAmA moderators starting to restrict their activities only to moderation. It degrades the experience of the site as a whole.
It’s a fairly brilliant move. They’re doing their duty as mods to the community. If Reddit wants to replace them, it has to be with people who are willing to actively do more work than just moderation, for free. They’d probably have to hire someone just to do AMA.
I really, really hope Victoria is getting a pitiful call from HR right now to come back.
I don’t think people are asking mods to burn the place down as much as they’re asking them to just stop. Stop working for free. Stop trying to negotiate. Don’t work for them and don’t work with them. Move your community elsewhere if you want to keep your moderator status and forget about Reddit.
That’s not radical nor is it a huge workload. It’s less work for most.
they’ll just replace them
replace them with who and how though? For loyalty and allegiance they’ll have to wind up paying someone eventually. If they really think they’re just going to be able to find some 15 year old on summer break willing to do it for free, it’ll only last so long. That stuff takes work.
🍿🍿🍿 … How can you not love this?
What’s the point, just move out of reddit already and let it die
I wish there was a way to quickly delete all your content. I could just delete my account, but I don’t my comments and posts to still be around and orphaned.
Request a GDPR takeout from reddit, wait for them to deliver, and then use a tool like Redact that can use that data to delete everything.
