[0zemp3c]

99.99% of reddit users have no idea who spez is and probably wouldn't care if they learned about his shenanigans

99% of reddit users are aware that moderators do some nice volunteer work but wouldn't cross the street to save them

its only Extremely Online people who care about this Insider Baseball stuff

[tedivm]

Sure, but without those moderators there's not much of a site. I don't spent a lot of time thinking about trash collection, but if all the garbage on my street stopped being collected I'd absolutely notice.

[sunflowerfly]

I hit Apollo yesterday out of muscle memory and clicked on one of my favorite subs. The posts were simply terrible. If that was the daily experience I would not ever read that sub.

[deaddodo]

So, wouldn't the proper protest be to instead...just quit? Let the subreddits get overrun by all of this spam and extreme posts and then the admins would appreciate their influence, no?

And, as a nice side benefit, maybe we'll finally get to prune the cabal of super-moderators that have been abusing their influence for over a decade now.

[raybanyoda]

Look at the AskHistorians community. Those mods LOVE their community. They would be walking away from a passion project.

These aren't just cheeto junkie computer nerds, these people are invested. So this is a little like saying "just leave your girlfriend of 5 years" like a lot of emotion is involved. You want it to work. You want to be in the ideal state. You don't want to quit. You want them to change.

[nightski]

You are probably right, but at the same time there are probably plenty of people willing to step in and take their place.

[EnragedParrot]

But now you have to subtract from the "plenty of people" those who are angered and disillusioned over Reddit's treatment of existing community mods and power users. You're whittling down the population of people who actually care about the subreddits they moderate and contribute to. So yeah, you could get them moderated, but the site would mostly go to garbage.

Reddit's triumph from the user perspective is that all of the content is driven by users, and those users are primarily made up of a small and passionate minority. The downfall of this fact from the business side is that Reddit as a company needs to appease those people because without their contributions, nobody would want to use the site.

[Sunspark]

It is true. Walking down the street, you gaze with more enjoyment at a garden someone took the time to make presentable and not so much the other property with the random weeds all over and perhaps an empty can.

[ntaylor]

The truth is that there are many, many niche communities where this is simply not true. Whole sections of reddit will die off due to lack of moderation and people will be forced to go elsewhere. This may not be a killing blow for reddit, but it will be devastating to the communities that it impacts.

[edgyquant]

Every community you’re talking about has users who would love to replace the mod team.

[jachee]

So that they, too, can get treated like crap by reddit? I don’t buy it.

[edgyquant]

No so that they can be the ones who get to ban people and shape the community.

[JumpCrisscross]

> without those moderators there's not much of a site

How many of those users would notice if Reddit swapped in paid moderators for the largest subs?

[sgift]

Reddit had years to make changes to the moderating situation. Any changes at all. Do you really think that they will start now instead of just cutting off their army of free mods and then wonder why things will go to shit even faster?

[JumpCrisscross]

> Do you really think that they will start now instead of just cutting off their army of free mods

Better now than during a roadshow.

[tezgon]

If they're concerned with the amount they lose to 3PAs, paying their moderators is a complete non-starter. The whole point of this is to increase revenue for the upcoming IPO.

[fdgjgbdfhgb]

Right, but the point of this change isn't really the _actual cost_ of 3rd party API usage, as much as the _opportunity cost_. They are way overcharging for the API, and they know it. Adding some expenses in the form of paid mods (let's be honest, probably off-shored to a 3rd world country and paid minimum wage) would be worth it, if it can guarantee the subs keep running.

[stetrain]

That probably won’t help with their quest for profitability.

[evandale]

> Sure, but without those moderators there's not much of a site.

I believe moderators on Reddit like to think that they're that important and integral to the site functioning smoothly, but I think the reality is upvoting/downvoting/reporting works perfectly fine in nearly every subreddit.

The only time it doesn't work is in places like r/AskHistorians or r/science which require high quality comments much like this place. You might argue with no moderation the subreddit would turn into a cesspool of reposts and memes - but who really cares? If that's what people want and that's what people are upvoting then let it be. There's no reason to have editorial control over subreddits when the entire point of the subreddit is to have stupid conversations, memes, and jokes. If people keep upvoting and enjoying the same stupid memes and jokes why do moderators feel like they need to step in and disrupt what the people find enjoyable?

[holmium]

> I believe moderators on Reddit like to think that they're that important and integral to the site functioning smoothly, but I think the reality is upvoting/downvoting/reporting works perfectly fine in nearly every subreddit.

This seems very naive, since afaik the mods also deal (thru 3rd party apps or extensions) with the large amount of spam that reddit gets. And, of course, who is going to deal with those reports?

I mean, sure, Reddit could close everything but the top 20 or 30 most popular subreddits, hire some offshored mods, and start the content moderation speedrun[1] anew. But, why? And how bad will it get before the IPO? Reddit has spent the past two decades washing their hands of any moderation tasks, as their first party mod tools show. Starting now, with a pissed off power user base, seems suicidal.

-----

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...

[volkl48]

Long-time user of the site, although currently taking a break:

I'd strongly disagree with that. Mods do an immense amount of work on Reddit just to keep their subreddits remotely on topic and not filled with constant reposts and spam. Also, they're the ones who actually deal with most of those reports - they don't get handled by magic or admins in most cases.

Unmoderated/absentee mod subreddits are frequently overrun by spam nonsense or taken completely off topic.

> If people keep upvoting and enjoying the same stupid memes and jokes why do moderators feel like they need to step in and disrupt what the people find enjoyable?

Because then every subreddit becomes basically the same thing and you might as well just have a giant impossible to navigate pile of content that's at best vaguely related to what the place it was posted is supposed to be for.

A lot of users spend part of their time just scrolling their home page feed and part of their time looking at specific subreddits. When doing the former, they're (IMO) less inclined to vote on if it fits in the place it was posted or not, just on if they like it - they may not even notice what sub it was actually posted in.

But that can ruin the subreddit as a place for a specific type of content, which is the typically the reason they joined/followed that subreddit in the first place.

[evandale]

How much work does a mod of a city subreddit with 600k subscribers really do though? Is it really necessary to have rules in a city subreddit such as 1) no questions or 2) no posts about crime?

That's what I don't understand. The mods in my city subreddit love to claim they get a ton of alt-right posts and are constantly fighting spam but I've browsed new for years on it and it's _extremely_ rare I see content like that and I highly doubt the mods are acting so fast that they're seeing things I before I do with how often I sat on new auto-refreshing the page.

[stetrain]

It’s possible for automoderator tools to immediately hide all new posts, or posts matching certain criteria, pending moderator approval.

Just because you don’t see it in new doesn’t mean it wasn’t posted.

[ok123456]

Then what value are the moderators adding if what they do can be automated by a regex filter?

[volkl48]

City/place subreddits tend to turn into an endless sea of the same question if unmoderated:

"I'm coming to visit as a tourist/think of moving here - tell me everything interesting to do in the city, where to eat, and where to stay/live"

These tend to be better answered by a wiki section, or a once a month/year thread that all those are referred to - because 95% of them are pretty much all the same for the answers.

That can basically overwhelm all actual news/discussion about the city and most of the larger city subreddits ban/restrict those for a reason.

-----

There's certainly places with mods run amok harming the ability to have constructive discussions/discuss certain topics most would find worthwhile, but a problem with one city's subreddit isn't every city's subreddit.

A glance at Toronto (I don't normally follow it) suggests they don't allow questions because they have set up a separate subreddit specifically for questions - /r/askTO. (NYC also does this with /r/asknyc). Aside from the past two days, it seems like decent questions over there get a decent response rate, and there's ~180k members, so it's not as though they're being kicked off to oblivion.

-----

> I've browsed new for years on it and it's _extremely_ rare I see content like that and I highly doubt the mods are acting so fast that they're seeing things I before I do with how often I sat on new auto-refreshing the page.

I will note that it's likely that a lot of the crap is being caught by how they've set up automod (and so, never makes it even to "new"), but depending on what they're doing, that probably still requires a human to sift through the results for stuff that they actually want to allow/is caught up in the filtering rules by mistake.

[8organicbits]

> reporting

Wasn't reporting handled by the mods?

> You might argue with no moderation the subreddit would turn into a cesspool of reposts and memes - but who really cares?

Presumably the people who used the subreddit would care. It seems like you think Reddit was only for shitposting, that wasn't my experience. It was a collection of forums, each with their own norms.

[evandale]

> Presumably the people who used the subreddit would care.

Right, I mentioned that for r/AskHistorians and r/science. What about regional subreddits? Why in the world does a subreddit for Toronto need rules like no CN tower pictures, no questions, or no posts about crime? Why can't the only rule be the post has to do with the city?

Why do moderators want to go beyond moderating spam and insist on presenting us with a curated feed of what they feel like I should be consuming? Why can't they let upvotes, downvotes, and reports speak for themselves and use that information to make removal decisions?

Why are so many moderators of subreddits against public moderation logs?

[stetrain]

One phenomenon that I think drives this is that the engaged users (ie commenters) are usually a small subset of the total user base that upvotes things.

The engaged users care about the topic of the sub and tend to interact with it directly, while the larger audience is subscribed but mostly upvotes things from their main feed without caring which sub it is from, or visiting the sub itself to see what all has been posted there.

I have seen many cases where the “just let the votes sort it out” method leads to things being upvoted, presumably by those users scrolling their main feed who don’t even notice what subreddit it is from, and then comment sections full of “who is upvoting this junk” “this is the third time this has been posted this week” and “mods can we please do something about all of the X posts?”

So mods tend to be pulled in two directions by those two groups, and one is louder than the other so they tend to get their way.

[tyg13]

> I have seen many cases where the “just let the votes sort it out” method leads to things being upvoted, presumably by those users scrolling their main feed who don’t even notice what subreddit it is from, and then comment sections full of “who is upvoting this junk” “this is the third time this has been posted this week” and “mods can we please do something about all of the X posts?”

Also known as the "all unmoderated subreddits eventually become /r/pics" problem. It's why a lot of major subs opted-out of being default when that was still a thing.

I've heard a lot of argumentation along those lines from users that seem to really not care what really made Reddit a special place on the Internet. To them, Reddit is another Instagram/TikTok/Facebook clone, and it seems that's a viewpoint the company is trying to support. It seems completely brain-dead in terms of understanding why the website got popular in the first place, but it seems there's a good number of "satisfied" users that want it that way.

[evandale]

> I have seen many cases where the “just let the votes sort it out” method leads to things being upvoted, presumably by those users scrolling their main feed who don’t even notice what subreddit it is from, and then comment sections full of “who is upvoting this junk” “this is the third time this has been posted this week” and “mods can we please do something about all of the X posts?”

Oh come on, you can't be serious. These are different groups of people. The same users who upvote things are not also complaining about what is being upvoted. You're not going to upvote things and then comment on the post to complain about how it's being upvoted.

It's the "engaged users" who create comment sections full of "who is upvoting this junk" because they don't understand the little circle of of people who make multiple "high quality" posts every day are the minority and the unwashed masses the moderators hate so much actually _DO_ want to see the reposts, memes, sunset pictures, and questions about the best place to find a burger because it's the one neutral topic people don't get into petty political fights over and comb through your comment history in an effort to dunk on you and defeat your point with an ad hominem.

[tornato7]

The worst I've seen are subreddits focused around physical location like cities/colleges, you get a lot of what amounts to cyber-bullying of individuals (like students posting hateful memes of professors they don't like), and this can lead to a pretty toxic subreddit (even inciting violence) without close moderation.

[lazycouchpotato]

> I think the reality is upvoting/downvoting/reporting works perfectly fine in nearly every subreddit.

Would you be able to provide examples of where you believe this to be the case?

[evandale]

Pretty much any small city or regional subreddits. My favourite example is r/Toronto. It's about 600k users and I don't expect it to be very hard to manage because I used to religiously browse by new before it got neutered earlier this year and made completely useless.

Lots of posts the powerusers over the years have complained about and slowly got rid of are repetitive are things like pictures, questions, and touristy stuff. Those things were extremely popular and got lots of upvotes but a couple powerusers who browse new got tired of them, decided to troll every post they didn't like, and the end result was the mods caving to them and not allowing the posts anymore rather than moderating the bad users and letting the votes sort themselves out.

On top of that, in January they decided to make the rule to ban articles about crimes happening in the city unless it has a significant impact. They were going to run a user survey at the end of January to gauge its popularity. They decided not to and now rule 8 of r/Toronto is no posts about crime. Now r/Toronto is just a sanitized feed of .. pretty much nothing? I don't know what content gets posted anymore that isn't complaining about the Ford government or housing prices. It's pretty sad when we don't even get the news about what's happening in Toronto in r/Toronto anymore unless the mods feel like it's an important enough for the whole city to know about. Why do Reddit mods get to decide what's important to r/Toronto users? I don't believe the subreddit should "belong" to them just because they had first mover advantage and now they get to run a major city subreddit using whatever rules they want.

and no, it's not realistic to spin off your own subreddit and create a new one. It works with bigger places like Canada or Ontario, but Toronto is too small to support multiple city subreddits and you'll never be more popular than r/Toronto because that's naturally the place everyone is going to go to first.

[stetrain]

> If people keep upvoting and enjoying the same stupid memes and jokes why do moderators feel like they need to step in and disrupt what the people find enjoyable?

The same question could be asked of Hacker News, which is run very much like a topically focused subreddit with rules, moderation, merging of duplicate topics, etc.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[evandale]

Yeah, I addressed this and you had to skip this sentence to quote the sentence you did: "The only time it doesn't work is in places like r/AskHistorians or r/science which require high quality comments much like this place."

[stetrain]

Ah I missed the “this place” piece. We’ll call that even on misreading each others comments considering your last reply to me.

Well then it’s clear you understand the value of good moderation, even in a place like Hacker News which is not nearly as strict IMO as the subs you mentioned.

I get your examples of over moderation and of course there are plenty of examples of this. I just think you may be in danger of conflating good moderation, which is often invisible and doesn’t involve a lot of moderator posting and onerous rules, with the lack of need for moderation at all.

[stetrain]

Who do you think receives and handles the reports?

[FormerBandmate]

Most posters use third party apps too. The people who use the official app treat it like About.com, not Instagram

[mynameisvlad]

Considering the amount of media attention this has gotten from even mainstream sources including places like the BBC, I’m going to go out on a limb and say the number is far higher than 99.99%.

That doesn’t even count all the people that are visiting their favorite subreddits only to see them closed with a message detailing what’s happened.

[George83728]

> Considering the amount of media attention this has gotten from even mainstream sources including places like the BBC

Reddit moderators are uniquely privileged when it comes to making their opinions heard on reddit. The shuttering of subreddits is sensational and splashy enough to get media attention, but in itself says little about how most reddit users feel. A moderator revolt is like a strike of middle managers, revolting against upper management. They can lock the doors and keep all the common workers out, but that isn't evidence that the common workers have much investment in the strike. I think this whole thing probably follows the 90-9-1 rule; the 9 are mods and powerusers flipping out against the 1, while the 90 are probably oblivious or simply indifferent.

[ink_13]

Some subs held polls, and in every one that I saw, the strike was quite broadly popular. I think characterizing this as a few power mods throwing their toys out of the pram is unfair.

[heyheyhey]

> Some subs held polls, and in every one that I saw, the strike was quite broadly popular.

These polls have an insane selection bias though. The ones who feel strongly for the issue will be the ones commenting and voting.

It's why stickies/sidebars/etc. rarely work because most of the users simply don't care enough to view them.

[Goronmon]

These polls have an insane selection bias though.

Sure, but isn't it in the other direction? The users are most affected by the change are those using third-party apps, but you can't vote in polls in third-party apps.

[TremendousJudge]

what's your point? the users who care are the users who post the stuff that the others come to see. yeah the majority are lurkers, but they actually like the high quality content or they wouldn't be there. without the power users there's no site.

[davidgerard]

So you're saying... the participants in the polls were the people who write and manage the content?

[jordanpg]

Yes, but the "strike" is temporary, so there's no real sacrifice. That's the main reason I think this whole thing is silly.

Like any activism that actually accomplishes anything, it must be sustained and involve real sacrifice to work. This is just "raising awareness," which I guess it has done, but it's easy enough for Reddit to just batten down the hatches and wait for it to blow over, which it will.

It's no different than when you hear about A march planned for this or that cause.

[ink_13]

It's a first step. I agree that in the longer term it will be necessary for continuing action, but you start with a warning shot, not scorched earth.

[Sunspark]

I was amused to see yesterday that my comments the day previous that some, but not all, reddit mods are paid had been silently deleted. I didn't get a bot message, they were just.. gone.. So, the corporation is watching, or the mod that is a reddit employee in the sub deleted them.

I was also surprised to see yesterday that this same large sub I made them in was blacked out. Virtue-signalling? Throwing a bone to volunteer co-mods in the sub? Against the API changes? Who knows. Big mess now. Tech people don't like change, but when they get mad, wheels start turning.

[czx4f4bd]

Your comments disappeared because the sub went private. Reddit won't show any comments from private subs you aren't allowed to view, even comments that you made.

[Sunspark]

I didn't know that. Thanks for the info. This seems like bad coding design that one cannot see their own history as it is disappeared externally via the actions of a sub.

[mynameisvlad]

It's impossible to know for sure how the userbase feels, but the attention has certainly made the situation known to a whole lot more than 0.01% of users. And most of the closures come with a lengthy explanation exactly why it's important and generally have comments praising the action.

The vocal dissenters certainly seem to be in the minority.

[EnragedParrot]

That's a valid point, but on the flip side, Reddit's content is user driven, and 99% of users never post or contribute anything, they're just on the site to consume content posted by that 1% of power users. Those power users are really the "extremely online" people who are angry about this. If you don't have moderators running subreddits and power users posting quality content, reddit doesn't have a product.

[badRNG]

<1% of Reddit users make the content that provides value to the site. This 1% is disproportionately likely to know who spez is and care about his shenanigans. Even less perform the moderation tasks that keep the site running, and they basically all care about this change.

[edgyquant]

Source for this? I think this is a commonly spouted stat that applied to non-social media websites. I have trouble believing social media sites have the same demographic makeup.

[badRNG]

It's a pretty well-known rule [0]. There's a good post about this in r/dataisbeautiful, but it is currently private.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

[AdamN]

The proof will be in the pudding. Reddit will survive but unless they back down, alot of people will leave permanently. What surprises me is how lackadaisical the board appears to be - so much money is being left on the table. I would be livid if I was an investor.

[ajmurmann]

Worse, in at least one huge sub I follow the mods are widely hated

[thepasswordis]

I think that’s most subs. This is why I’m actually torn between which group I dislike the most.

On the one hand, the admins are being absolute children to the mods. But that said: most (all?) if the Reddit mods I have interacted with are also overgrown children.

The “mods vs admins” thing seems like two toddlers screaming at each other. It’s at a point where I kind of want both sides to lose.

Something in the culture changed 4-5 years ago where being a mod went from a job where you remove spam posts, to a role where you decide what is allowed for discussion.

On my city subreddit, for instance, they’ve gotten it to the point where practically anything which isn’t a photo of a sunset is seen as off topic and removed.

And then there’s stuff like: mods will decide to “lock” threads they don’t like. There was a discussion on /r/Catholicism talking about an anti-Catholic group being invited, then uninvited, then reinvited to perform at a baseball game. After a few hours of discussion the mods “locked” this, meaning you couldn’t participate in it anymore.

It’s extremely annoying.

[evandale]

> Something in the culture changed 4-5 years ago where being a mod went from a job where you remove spam posts, to a role where you decide what is allowed for discussion.

> On my city subreddit, for instance, they’ve gotten it to the point where practically anything which isn’t a photo of a sunset is seen as off topic and removed.

Yep, this is what needs fixing. My local city subreddit decided there was too much news in the city about crime and banned posting stories about crime in January. It's now June and still a rule. You can only post a story about someone committing a crime or getting arrested if their crime had a city-wide impact.

There was a story about teenagers shooting fireworks off on a public bus around Victoria day this year and that post was allowed. People shat on the teenagers and said whatever they wanted about them. It got as nasty as you'd expect. The post announcing their arrest though? It turned out to be a group of POC and so the mods locked the comments within minutes because they anticipated "bad" comments and it was going to be too difficult to moderate.

The other annoying thing before that was a small group of powerusers getting annoyed with people asking too many easy-to-Google questions. So a few choice posters would always come in and make the same "I recommend House of Lancaster" (a strip club with a reputation) for every question that got asked. It didn't matter what the question was, there was at least 1 house of Lancaster suggestion. It turned into a meme, the moderators noticed people were hostile to newcomers, and rather than outlawing being hostile to people they banned questions!

It’s _extremely_ annoying.

[ink_13]

Sounds like the real problem is that those questions were drowning out all other content. Personally I don't object to moderators setting rules that reduce noise. Or, to put it another way, moderating.

[evandale]

They weren't though. The bad questions stayed buried in new with 0 votes. Removing questions literally only affected people who browsed new and most people don't browse new.

Reddit has tools to hide posts you personally don't want to see without affecting the entire subreddit with silly rules. If you browse new you should be aware of these things.

[thepasswordis]

Oh my god the banning questions thing is infuriating. Just let people not answer it if they don’t want to. Linking everybody to an FAQ from 4 years ago is not helpful. We don’t need more room for pictures of sunsets, and even if we did, nobody is paying per character.

My actual hope is that what comes out of this protest is that the majority of moderation is simply removed.

Forgive me for not shedding any tears because mods wont be able to stalk users using push shift anymore. The horror.

[evandale]

> Just let people not answer it if they don’t want to.

hah, I tried making this argument for months, no years, after the decision was made - that they were banning the wrong thing. It's trivial (and a built in Reddit feature) to automatically hide posts after you vote them (up or down - you have full control) and there's even the hide button to hide posts you don't want to vote on. It would have been so easy (and made nearly everyone happy) to have the rule to be against bad faith answering questions. To encourage people to downvote and ignore questions you they want to answer. If nobody is answering or voting for the questions then people will stop asking them.

Well powerusers didn't want questions period (and I think some friends of the mods already had control of the question subreddit) so they punted questions off to a different subreddit.

The mods definitely get some enjoyment through trolling people and making the experience on the city subreddit miserable - most of them are extremely active in a shitposting subreddit that was specifically made for making fun of users in the city subreddit. The powerusers that were involved in the bad behavior own the shitposing subreddit too. It's a small sort of r/drama or r/subredditdrama for a local subreddit. If you make the "right" comments in the city subreddit (i.e. dunk on the "right" people) you get invited to mod the shitposting subreddit.

What's really needed is a public moderator log outlining what gets removed. I wouldn't care about things being removed that much if I had an option to see it. I really hate that they can remove things that _someone_ found interesting about the city and I can't see it at all because of arbitrary rules the moderators made.

[Sunspark]

This is why Reddit if they want to be a community needs to allow ELECTIONS.

Our MPPs and MPs are elected for multi-year terms.

Why not require that mods be elected for a 2 year term and that they have to campaign to be re-elected? If they are a hated mod, they won't get re-elected.

Instead we have dictator-for-life Eric Cartman moderating multiple subs.

[ajmurmann]

Are there actually enough people willing to do the mod job? I am only in one sub where everyone hates the mods, but even there I haven't seen any discussion of anyone becoming a mod. Maybe it's because mods delete insurrectionist posts. However, I cannot imagine many people want to do such a thankless and stressful job that pays nothing at all.

[Sunspark]

It's not thankless or stressful if all you do is just enforce the overall corporation rules plus perhaps some locally agreed upon additional rules.

If people want to post sunsets and nobody is writing you emails to complain about it, then have at it. It's the voice of the people.

[fakedang]

I'm pretty sure mods are paid from somewhere. I remember reading some stuff about 4 or 5 years back, about how the left-wing party of that country (I think it was UK Labour) had taken over mod duties of the country subreddit.

[ajmurmann]

"On my city subreddit, for instance, they’ve gotten it to the point where practically anything which isn’t a photo of a sunset is seen as off topic and removed."

hah, my reference to the one large sub where the mods are widely hated was about my city's sub which from your description might be the same. Edit: In this case, I have some empathy for the mods though, since that sub faced invasions from people outside the city who hate it.

[e40]

This varies greatly.

Most of the subs I'm in, the mods are thought of pretty highly or not at all.

[thomascgalvin]

People on Reddit vastly overestimate how closely Reddit's opinion lines up with that of the general public.

If the last US Presidential election was held on Reddit, Bernie Sanders would have won in a landslide. He obviously did not.

When Netflix announced it was cracking down on password sharing, Reddit declared that this would be the final nail in their coffin. Instead, subscriptions skyrocketed.

Reddit power users are angry at spez and claim that this will be the end of the site, but the average Reddit user has maybe heard about all of this, and mostly doesn't care.

[marricks]

> 99.99% of reddit users have no idea who spez is

That's why people do things like black outs and protests, so people can learn who people are and what is happening.

> probably wouldn't care if they learned about his shenanigans

That's information is associated with protests, so people can decide if they care.

I can actually understand how most wouldn't care about this. This change isn't that important to me except in that's it's another stepping stone on the death of the free and open web. Twitter API, Reddit API, real ID on Facebook, probably countless other things. What we expected to have in the 2010's is going fast.

[nemo44x]

> its only Extremely Online people who care about this Insider Baseball stuff

I think this is the case for many things. And I imagine people will/are get wise to it. Elon Musk I think figured this out when he did what he did with Twitter. Some very online people really cared and made a lot of noise and the very online part of the media that cares made a lot of noise. But those people don't really matter and the media side has declining ratings year after year as they become more and more irrelevant.

I think the paper tigers are starting to be exposed and they had a good run for the last 10 years by being very online and making a lot of noise. But ultimately, their voices don't matter.

[watwut]

It really does not seem to me that Musk figured anything out. He is loosing both money and users at massive speed.

[nemo44x]

They have a higher user count than they’ve ever had breaking their own MAU records.

Advertising will come back. There’s anti-Twitter pressure campaigns and for economic reasons ad spend slowed. It’s all coming back.

He controls the worlds largest and most important megaphone. That’s priceless.

[watwut]

> They have a higher user count than they’ve ever had breaking their own MAU records.

Yeah, because the bots and spam area largely out of control. There is significantly much more of it them used to be. And no, ads did not went down because of pressure campaigns, but because of serious mismanagement of ad accounts.

[callalex]

It’s easy to make your MAU go up when you fire all the anti-bot teams.

[FormerBandmate]

Why would Elon Musk care if he loses money on Twitter? His Tesla stake has gone up more in the past 4 weeks than the entire amount he personally spent on Twitter

[watwut]

> Why would Elon Musk care if he loses money on Twitter? His Tesla stake has gone up more in the past 4 weeks than the entire amount he personally spent on Twitter

Having another income source really does not imply he does not care about a company where he is spending most of the time.