Finding new moderators would be a incredible challenge. If someone wants to be a moderators badly, that is usually disqualifying.
You get an immense amount of power with very little accountability except to the community. Put that in the wrong hands and you can destroy a community incredibly quickly.
Or, put power in the hands of a dilettante, and you get overrun with spam and insults very fast.
Nah, there's plenty of people just waiting to take over even the smallest of niche subs. I saw it firsthand back during the 2nd wave of gentrification in spring 2018 when a bunch of commercially uncomfortable subreddits like r/gundeals and their users (like my 2008 reddit account) were banned. The subreddits I moderated like r/radioastronomy were given to other users to moderate within a month or two. Reddit eventually admitted it was wrong about banning r/gundeals and reinstated the sub but my account was never unbanned.
And any sub with serious activity will have power mods submitting applications for take-over so they can commercialize it.
2. The new mod heavily restricted posts, seemingly for three years. They declined to reply to messages for nine months, until a new Reddit request happened on Jan 3 2021. A comment in that thread said "there hasn't been a new post in ages!", confirming your replacement had locked the place down: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/kpf083/reque...
Sub seems alright now, but after a three year long false start with an inactive mod who locked the place down.
Further, it took up to 16 days to handle the request. For a very small sub. And I've seen reddit requests take much longer.
Now reddit would have to, at a stroke, replace at least 8,000 of their most active subs, all at once, and make sure they don't appoint people who are insane, or draconian, or power hungry, or in it for their own profit, etc.
I don't see this working. You may have some knowledge of /r/radioastronomy in those periods which contradicts what I wrote, but the public record suggests the transition wouldn't bode well for mass replacing every single moderator at once.
I'm pretty sure that Reddit doesn't have enough paid employees to undertake that sort of vetting at the scale required, even if they wanted to. I think they're probably just hoping and praying that this all blows over, that most mods are more addicted to their communities than anything else.
It's a very cynical move, but you've laid out in exquisite detail why it's their ONLY move, other than walking back their policy. While the company as a whole would benefit from that walkback, I think Mr. Huffman himself would probably lose his job.
> We also want to reiterate that we respect your decisions to do what’s best for your community, and will do what we can to ensure you're safe while doing so. However, we do expect that these decisions have been made through consensus, and not via unilateral action. We ask that you strive to ensure that your moderator team is aligned on community decision-making – regardless of what decisions are being made. If you believe that your community or another community is being subject to decisions made by a sole moderator without buy-in from the broader mod team, you can let us know via the Moderator Code of Conduct form above.
They’re hoping to have some lower level mods who disagree with going private turn to the admins. I doubt it would work but might reopen a few subreddits.
What does that really accomplish? Reddit mods are often bad enough as is, imagine what Reddit scab mods would be like.
It would also be a huge invitation for the displaced the rest to make life unbearable for those new mods and the handful of admins overseeing them. Reddit as a community would make for one hell of an intellectual DDOS.
To borrow from another comment buried below: I think the company cares more about the appearance of "business as usual" in the face of an IPO than the opinions of the users.
In their eyes, this is all nothing more than a tempest in a teapot; a small pothole on the road to public investor dollars.
I can sort of understand the mentality, but right now Reddit looks like a terrible IPO prospect. It isn't profitable, it's poorly managed, lacks transparency, depends on volunteers to function on a daily basis, and when they make a move to make themselves profitable their user base rebels in a fairly public and humiliating way.
All of this in the post-Fed rate hike world where money isn't free. Besides I feel it's important to remember that Reddit has been talking about an IPO for many years, and I doubt it's going to happen now.
I seem to remember someone saying something about how a small number of users mod the vast majority of Reddit in terms of the number of users within the subreddits they control. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a black market for mod status. Might not be such a bad thing if the establishment was totally uprooted.
> a small number of users mod the vast majority of Reddit
I think it's more like there are a small number of users who are mods on a huge number of subs, but there are other mods that focus more directly on the actual moderation of those subs.
The main reason why reddit works as a platform is because its mods and subreddit regulars do a lot of unpaid work. Where is reddit going to find enough people to work for free on such short notice?
Oh, that's easy, if they are looking for scabs to mod a million+ sub, I volunteer myself immediately. I've got a lot of great ideas that I'm really eager to try out.
The only thing that I'll be able to guarantee is that you'll really not like me as a mod.
Reddit is odd.... while most communities hate the mods, they hate admins far more. Admins taken over a subreddit would kill it in the eyes of the users.
I think the admins will care more about the appearance of "business as usual" in the face of an IPO than the opinions of the users who would notice a moderator replacement.
In their eyes, this is all nothing more than a tempest in a teapot; a small pothole on the road to public investor dollars.
the API thing was that, it is moved beyond that now, and admin action on that level will make the API issue an after thought...
If they do that, forget IPO, there will be no more reddit at all.
right now they already missed the IPO point years ago, today for a company to have a successful IPO they need more than good MAU numbers, and this API change was never going to get to the profitability numbers they need for a good IPO
The internet forgets too quickly. And so long as Reddit can present a "everything's awesome" front, their IPO will likely take off.
Having /r/Pics down permanently because of a protest would be a problem, but a poorly moderated /r/Pics would not. The quality would just go down, and Reddit would get a good justification for locking it down.
"No, /r/Pics wasn't shut down because of the protest, it was shut down because there were too many law-breaking posts. And you know how tough we have to be on those kinds of posts."
At least, that's my take on how most investors would look at it. Investors love companies who focus on profitability, regardless of their long term perspective.
There seems to be a disconnect to what I am saying...
You seem to believe a low quality /r/pics would bring in traffic, even more weirdly you seem to believe the admins shutting down /r/pics because of illegal content, is better for profitability then it being shut down because of a protest, not sure how that works....
Traffic, and users drive profitablity, High Quality User Generated content drives that traffic and attracts users
If reddit loses high quality user generated content, there is no traffic, and thus there is nothing to sell to be profitable, no ads, not API, nothing
it would not matter if /r/pics was shutdown in protest, or shutdown because of poor moderation, it is still shut down, and thus no profits from it.
investors love companies that are profitable, especially right now when the cost of capital is very high. "focusing on profitability" is not the same as delivering profitability. Investors right now want results, not power points about how they project the results being
They seem to honestly believe that increasing monetization is an equally existential question for the platform. IPO or no IPO, they can't run off of VC funding forever, and they say they aren't currently profitable.
That would seem to setup a situation where Reddit has to fill a gap of a huge amount of moderation work that they previously didn’t have to do / people did that for them for free.
A long time IMO, because that would just escalate the situation. At this point they are going to wait and see in the hopes that the majority of people lose interest after a few protests. Then they can just push through the changes.
If they take over these subs, you just radicalise the users, and you now have to find new moderators for these subs. In a worst case scenario, users actually start migrating to another platform.
You get an immense amount of power with very little accountability except to the community. Put that in the wrong hands and you can destroy a community incredibly quickly.
Or, put power in the hands of a dilettante, and you get overrun with spam and insults very fast.