I mean, looking at trends of any company and the fact that Reddit is about to IPO it's only a matter of time before they ban the ability for community members to mod subreddits.
this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
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MODERATORS
Who else is going to do it though?
✨ AI ✨
lol reddit's automated AEO is already notoriously dogshit, trying to replace human moderation with AI would be a fucking disaster. So I say do it spez. I double dare you!
Oh, I'd love to see that happen.
We need more clusterfucks caused by AI, until people shut the fuck up about it.
Crypto was more of a fiction than AI and it's somehow still around. How many times can the same ponzi scheme collapse?
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Yeah they need the community for that. They needed the community for everything. And you know what? Go on that site right now. It’s just endless dribble. Reformatted TikTok videos posted by bots. People endlessly repeating the same shit over and over again. Bots copying those endlessly repeated comments on the subsequent reposts. Where’s the stuff that made Reddit special? Has there been a chuck testa meme or noteworthy cool event like a good ama or the Christmas exchange that’s occurred recently? Is there content coming out of the site that’s making the news like it once did? Is the spark there? No
Now it’s just another corporate whore of a company where a bunch of sparkling water drinking pussies with erectile dysfunction sit around trying to figure out how they can best game the system to exploit their pageviews.
The ceo of this company comes out embracing Elon Musk, whines about how the community is cutting into his bottom line, and we are supposed to sit around continuing to provide this man with the content he needs to keep his website alive?
Fuck that.
I think the people who create the gold that makes the internet what it is have sort of scattered to the ether and they’re waiting for the next thing to pop up. When it happens you’ll see that spark come about once more. Actual interesting content. Good topical memes. A fun atmosphere that doesn’t feel exploited by some pretentious pricks.
I want it to be lemmy and the fediverse. We are lying to ourselves if we think this caught all the people stepping off the sinking ship. But I think with some collective upgrades and a way better ui that can be marketed to the average person. This could and should be it.
Here’s hoping we see that happen.
and we are supposed to sit around continuing to provide this man with the content he needs to keep his website alive?
In other words, he's "landed gentry".
I mean, if you want it, the only thing that is stopping it is your posts on here. I left that site on the 9th and try and make this place something I enjoy by posting and commenting as much as I can. I'm only at 158 posts and 1270 comments.
Progress and evolution always move forward. We can't go back and reddit will never exist again, but we can be a part of the next thing and help each other morn the loss of what was. All of us would likely become disconnected moronic pricks if we made 192 million dollars last year. I'm sure that buys Spez lots of trips to wherever Epstein Island 2.0 is located now.
All of us would likely become disconnected moronic pricks if we made 192 million dollars last year.
I really don't think that's true. If we had always made that much, maybe, but knowing what I do, and being who I am? It'd change me, but not fundamentally. I believe this to be true of most people. Power doesn't just corrupt; it amplifies.
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They'll just start taking over the large money-makers (if they havent already): pics, funny, memes, news, gaming etc.
Maybe they'll even create a tiered system of "community curated" subreddits and "official" subs.
Either way, they don't have to moderate the whole site, just the parts that take in most of the traffic. That way you don't have to deal with volunteers and their personal beefs and/or protests to your changes.
Most of the smaller subs are basically dead anyway, in terms of moderation. Many of them are way less active too.
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Why would anyone do free work for a corporation to profit off of?
I used to be a mod at /r/soccer.
I used it when it was a wild-west shitshow full of the same old posts. I used it for a decade, and when they needed mods in my timezone I thought I'd use the time I was gifted thanks to COVID and redundancy to help out.
Most mods have very little power, and a lot of scrutiny if there are more than a few mods. It's just a queue you occasionally look at to see what has been reported, and you action it based on the rules.
Yes, you have described performing work. Many people do the same, but with emails, and get paid.
For 10ish mins a day? Sign me up to that job!
Out of interest, how do you see it as any different to being a mod on Lemmy?
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Especially when working for projects like Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap is way more rewarding
I moderated a mid sized sub for a while. Around 100k users. It was a hobby I was into and I figured may as well moderate because I was spending a lot of time on the sub anyways. It also let me put together some community events which were always fun. Once it stopped being fun and started feeling like a job, I left. I never really thought about it as doing free work for reddit and more helping community building for a hobby I had. People do it for all sorts of reasons. The "power mods" are really the issue.
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“Losing free labor will hurt our business”
-signed, the plantation owner who made $193,000,000 last year
Nothing can really kill reddit, but as far as content goes I expect it will follow the same path facebook did where the only people who eventually really interact on it will be conspiracy theorists and moms.
Bankruptcy can kill Reddit. Give the C-suite some credit, they can still drive that sucker straight into the ground.
Its a good thing the Moderators famously fumbled their one attempt at protesting for anything significant to reddit
You say it like mods are anything other than a bunch of random diverse people with little to no communications between those on different subs
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They should've just stopped moderating in mass. If Reddit wants to replace them that's fine, they'll just need to replace all of them at once.
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I really don't know what could kill Reddit at this point. It's so different now with Reddit's new UI, the awards, blocking VPN connections, and Reddit licensing user content for AI training. We saw how things went with the blackout and how so many people caved instantly and were willing to fill the roles of the people that left once subreddits were forced back open.
Maybe blocking NSFW content or requiring users to verify their age?
I don't think it will die, it will probably just fade into irrelevancy. They are hostile to their users, their creators and moderators. Literally the only things that give them value. It will become this fake hypercurated space, like those content pages that produce clean fake feelgood videos. When originality dies in a space it migrates elsewhere and you're left with a shell of unoriginal normie shit. Of all places instagram is popping off with original content and vibrant comment spaces.
Can't kill what is already dead.
The communities are all but gone.
The signal to noise ratio is the worst it's ever been.
Most subs are barely moderated. Actual mod involvement (as opposed to Automod) is low.
Reddit now openly collects and sells user data.
The Reddit we knew is dead and gone.
The only place I've seen that still has some life and great energy is r/comics. If lemmy's version(s) of that group could attract the regular content creators I wouldn't have any other reason to visit reddit.
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Fuck yeah, fuck its business. Fuck reddit for going IPO and Fuck spez for being an insufferable gaping asshole
"Could hurt its business"
Apparently we didn't do much. I'm just happy to be on Lemmy so I don't have to care.
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I modded a few subreddits but left it all behind
I just remembered the other day I'm listed as the only moderator of a subreddit with a couple thousand users and haven't done anything for it in about a year.
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The last one showed four important things:
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It can be coordinated super easily and has broad support amongst the mods
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It's popular with most users outside of sports subreddits and they're hostile toward scab mods and admins.
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Reddit fundamentally has zero response to it and anything they try compounds their issues. They can't offer mods anything short of the wage that 24/7 customer service job for a multi-billion dollar company should entail. They can't censor the protests without it causing a Streisand effect and major backlash which reinforces points 1 and 2.
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Mods don't have any control over the subreddit anyway. It's arbitrarily taken away and given to anyone who asks for it. The only consequence for anyone protesting is reddit saying you can't do the volunteer work that you're protesting over the conditions of already. The next schmuck still has to do that work with those conditions knowing reddit hates them just as much as they hated you.
I think the next mod strike is the breaking point for the website. They're going to have a worse response, people are going to be angrier, and the shareholders are going to add a whole new layer of demands that can't be enforced without making everything worse for mods and users. Once that mod exodus hits, the website instantly becomes unusable and full of wildly illegal things. There's no Plan B for that which isn't very expensive.
Another blackout during their IPO would certainly send their stock prices off to a good start...
That might happen but that's not where the real pressure point is. Sometime shortly after the IPO, whatever hype exists around it is going to give way to the reality that reddit is an unprofitable company at the end of a tech bubble built on 0% interest rates that aren't coming back. There is no way for reddit to become profitable without making itself unusable and sanitising the NSFW content that drives a huge amount of its traffic. When the price tanks, they've bribed their 75k most loyal users and mods into accepting the IPO with advanced purchase options at what might be the high point of its value. That's when shit stands to rupture. Reddit will have failed everyone to enrich Steve Huffman and the venture capitalists who invested in their earlier rounds and there's no way for them to control that tantrum spiral.
Pretty sure most subreddits that put it to a vote had the userbases support the blackouts as well.
r/snackexchange was fun. I sabotaged the subreddit by embracing Spez's call for user democracy, making everything about it up for a vote every day. Some weird little goober ratfucked that and the admins made them the head mod, despite them only participating in the subreddit one time ten years before and there being two existing mods who programmed third-party tools we were protesting for. Those tools were necessary for running the subreddit. The users instantly turned on this guy despite me being a more or less absent mod for years and destroying the subreddit in protest. He became a proxy for the admins and caught so much flak that he has only posted a couple times since, and not in r/snackexchange.
There were a few larger subreddits that got mod couped with similar hate toward the scabs, but having seen the worst case example it's great. They do their big power move and it's the 
gun. When they threatened to do it in r/Science the guy requesting it was an antivaxxer who markets herbal supplements. Let a thousand fuckups bloom.
But one thing it also demonstrated was peoples will for power and recognition, no matter how small. They enjoy being mods, it makes them feel above others, so there will always be someone willing to trade morals to take the position.
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Besides having their community migrate to Lemmy, the thing moderators can do that impacts reddit the most is making their sub NSFW, because
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Reddit gets no ad revenue from NSFW subs, and
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NSFW subs will be excluded from their new $60m/year AI training deal.
I imagine if mods changed subs to NSFW for actually non-NSFW subs that those mods will be replaced with bootlickers with boots so far up their ass they can taste them.
This actually happened. Mods werde forced to turn back to SFW or they would have been removed
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Rip their fucking eyes out
Reverse psychology Uno card attempt to get any remaining mod or community they don't control to out themselves as a risk and be ousted, imo.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The company also said that bad publicity and media coverage, such as the kind that stemmed from the API protests, could be a risk to Reddit’s success.
The Form S-1 said bad PR around Reddit, including its practices, prices, and mods, "could adversely affect the size, demographics, engagement, and loyalty of our user base," adding:
Reddit’s filing also said that negative publicity and moderators disrupting the normal operation of subreddits could hurt user growth and engagement goals.
Reddit's filing discusses losing moderators as a business risk and notes how important third-party tools are in maintaining mods:
Any disruption to, or lack of availability of, these third-party tools could harm our moderators’ ability to review content and enforce community rules.
Nondisclosure agreement requirements and the lack of a finalized developer platform also drive uncertainty around the longevity of the third-party Reddit app ecosystem, according to devs Ars spoke with this year.
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