[thewataccount]

I support the blackouts but

> Reddit isn't even profitable. Hiring mods for thousands of subreddits would cost them a ton of money, not only in wages but in the cost of finding and training those workers.

They don't need to. Aww (36m), music(32m), videos(26m), futurology(18m), me_irl, and abrupt chaos are some of the biggest ones, if they seize just those 6 then they've reclaimed most of the r/popular anyway.

[colonwqbang]

Reddit can't afford to pay the employees they already have out of the revenue they make. That's ostensibly the reason why they raised prices on the API in the first place. Losing all that free labour is absolutely the last thing they want at this juncture.

But even ignoring that, suppose all >15M subreddit suddenly get salaried mods. Don't you think the mods of e.g. a 13M subreddit would want a piece of the cake too, and would strike to get it? Or would they just wait around and keep working until their subreddit is also "siezed" by Reddit inc.

Is there any example of a community which successfully runs on mixed salaried/volunteer moderator labour in such a way?

[thewataccount]

> Reddit can't afford to pay the employees they already have out of the revenue they make, that's ostensibly the reason why they raised prices on the API in the first place.

I'm sure there'd be plenty of volunteers who already manage several of the big 20M+ subs that didn't go dark. We're only talking about 6 subs, and they aren't that complex.

> Don't you think the mods of e.g. a 13M subreddit would want a piece of the cake too, and would strike to get it?

They don't matter nearly as much. The top few are what make up the home page with a few others just sprinkled in. And again I highly doubt reddit would need to pay mods.

Again we're only talking about 6 subs. Not even double digits. There's already groups of subs that mod many, many large subreddits.

[colonwqbang]

You're assuming that if Reddit decides to "fire" all mods of the top subreddits, there would be dozens of (suitable) people happily waiting to take their place. I don't think that's remotely the case.

> The top few are what make up the home page with a few others just sprinkled in. And again I highly doubt reddit would need to pay mods.

Reddit wouldn't exactly be Reddit if you reduce it to only /r/aww and five of the other most mainstream subreddits. If that's what you think will happen... Well I don't exactly disagree with you, but Reddit would be a very different product at that point.

[lumenwrites]

If that happens, wouldn't the next obvious thought for the "rebelling" users be "spam and troll these subreddits as much as humanly posssible"?

And they'd be extra motivated too, since forcibly removing the mods would be seen as escalation of the conflict.

[paulmd]

But then they’d get banned and lose all that Reddit karma and their very important badges

And oops all the subs that aren’t total shit have min-karma requirements these days… hope you didn’t enjoy posting in those?

there just is this disconnect between the Redditors who imagine that all the users are behind them and the actual masses who will keep scrolling r/aww and mildlyinteresting and so on. If 5-10% of users want to self-immolate and be banned, that’s fine. People will get bored of the harassment campaign in a couple weeks, and the world will generally keep turning.

Mod labor is not irreplaceable either. The six people running 60 of the top 100 subs aren’t doing any personal work either, they’re just setting up scripts/etc. And at a lower level, there is an infinite supply of people willing to be petty tyrants for a modicum of personal power.

The users of the TikTok-Shaped Reddit that spez is trying to pivot to don’t care about any of this and in a year they will have stabilized around a new user base. And that won’t include a lot of the current powerusers/powermods and they clearly know that and it’s fine for them.

Probably only 10% of users even comment so if you’re that engaged you’re not the users they care about. And sure, those are the people posting content etc, but the Reddit calculation clearly is that they will be able to repost tiktok videos and memes onto the subs perfectly well without the users who want to leave. Which does include me, most likely.

Gallowboob alone is responsible for a large fraction of the top-scoring content on Reddit. The labor of reposting TikTok and tumblr onto a third platform is just not as valuable as aggrieved Redditors imagine. It can be replaced by a very small shell script, and that’s all you need to do, is to keep content flowing and there’ll be a large retention of users endlessly scrolling, that’s all it takes.

[thewataccount]

Content spam is way easier to manage especially automatically and I don't mean with LLMs, just current tools.

The only reason why it's working right now is because the mods in charge of these subs are upset, and a few mods can shutdown a 30m+ sub. I suspect the number of users on r/aww that care _that much_ to get their account banned for spam.

If it was just users being upset (which would be the case if reddit reclaims them) I just don't think there's enough upset people for there to be an impact like that.

[ribosometronome]

How have you come to that conclusion?

Just earlier this month Reddit started having issues with follower spam -- something that was specifically a problem because it bypassed volunteer mod control and Reddit was doing a shit job taking care of it. There were tons of threads about how to turn off those notifications.

Just yesterday Musk was lamenting about how bad the bot situation on Twitter has gotten recently.

And none of that even gets into keeping content on topic for a community, just straight up spam.

[wvenable]

The assumption is that those communities would just go back to normal if they were seized by Reddit. I'm not sure that's a good assumption.

[thewataccount]

r/aww is literally just cute animals. Most of the others are just memes/reposts of their respective topic.

There's plenty of mods from subreddits that didn't go dark and have 20m+, reddit can just put them in charge.

I highly doubt the specific mods matter that much on these "fluff" subreddits. Subreddits like r/apple I could see it mattering a lot more, but most of the top ones aren't exactly complex topics.

[wvenable]

> r/aww is literally just cute animals.

There is a social contract and moderator effort to make that happen. When that contract is broken and moderators are stretched thin, how long is that subreddit still going to be just cute animals?

[paulmd]

In six months the average front page-sub user won’t be aware there was ever a social contract broken. Look, cute puppies.

[gremlinsinc]

I'm betting all subreddits soon turn into /r/eyeblech (gore/death/dismemberment gifs). Not necessarily illegal, but definitely not what you're looking for when you go to /r/awww

[paulmd]

redditors really think they invented shitflooding lol

“Fact: there is NO DEFENSE against the digital ghillie suit!”

[thewataccount]

I appreciate the current mod's efforts.

And I completely agree with you on 95%+ of subs.

But I think there's enough active, and willing mods who already manage several large subreddits (10m+) capable of managing the half a dozen or so subs that I mentioned.

And I'm only talking about 6 subs, not even 10's of subs.

I just don't think theres enough ambiguity/complexity with moderating those in regards to choosing what content is or isn't appropriate for that sub.

But either way I truly hope we can get old reddit back, api, third party clients, and all :(

[SirSourdough]

If one of Reddits big goals in all this is to sell actually useful information on a broad variety of topics for training LLMs (I think they’ve basically said as much), then I’m not sure that only being able to prop up a few meme and cute animal subreddits is that much of a win.

It’s the long tail of niche subreddits where almost all the content that keeps Reddit at the top of SEO rankings and makes them interesting for training AI lives.

[max51]

can you name a single from r/aww ? Could you even tell if they reopened it with new mods? People are not that passionate about mods from a sub about cute animals.

Even in subs where people are very passionate about moderation, they just give up and forget about it very quickly because it's not worth it. r/Animemes/ still has orders of magnitude more visitors than the alternative people moved to after their big mod drama.

Extremely few people interacts with mods and care about them

[DSMan195276]

I suspect if Reddit starts replacing those mods outright you could see other mods leaving, it might work out for Reddit but it's a dangerous game. Also, which mods get removed, and would they be banned completely? The big subreddits have lots of mods, many who just help with small stuff and from my understanding do so over a lot of the large subreddits, so the actual details here of who stays, who's leaving what subreddits, etc. probably get murky pretty fast. (And that's besides the fact that the new mods would have little idea how things were currently run, unless some of the existing mods help them).

[jtode]

The selling point of Reddit, though, is not that r/popular is the greatest list of links ever created. The selling point is that you can tailor your links perfectly to your tastes, right? Good luck to them.

[634636346]

> futurology(18m),

I had no idea futurology was that big. I remember years ago when it used to be a singularity/life-extension/transhumanist subreddit, and then it got brigaded by climate change activists, to the point that most of the articles on the front page were about clean energy, rising sea levels, and recycling. Also a lot of doomer types actually bemoaning life extension outright, because of the usual nonsense about "where will we put ALL THE PEOPLE" and "Drump will live FOREVER." I stopped checking it out years ago, but it serves as a case study of how entryists co-opt and destroy online communities.

[predictabl3]

lol good luck getting to the singularity when food scarcity hits riot levels and the coasts are flooding. The future we get is the future we deserve, not the one we fantasize about.