[rjvir]

Spez is CEO because the board and investors deem him to be the best person for the job. Of course, he founded Reddit, so he has a strong case on merit for why he is the #1 person on the planet to run the company.

The process for selecting moderators is way less meritocratic or democratic than this. They merely got there first, finders keepers. The analogy for landed gentry is accurate.

[cragfar]

>They merely got there first, finders keepers.

That hasn't really been the case for a while. Especially for the larger subs like r/videos. R/news for example was created 15 years ago and it's oldest mod was modded two years ago. Also the admins come in and remove top mods of problematic subs (generally alt right/brigading subs) all the time.

[dehrmann]

He's the CEO because he was the best person to take over after Ellen Pao resigned. He's the CEO today less because he's the right person, and more because the metrics were moving in the right direction and inertia. He might still be the best person for the job, but it isn't something the board actively reconsiders unless they have a reason to.

[KerrAvon]

If I were on the board, I’d be engaged in discussion with my fellow board members right now about whether spez is demonstrating the temperament befitting a good CEO.

Even if you think the shit coming out of his mouth to be the right attitude, you have to ask why he’s saying it out loud, abrasively, in public, where it’s only going to make the product less attractive.

[dredmorbius]

Odds are exceedingly high that spez is doing the Board's bidding.

The Board is not your savior here.

[norgie]

The reason for spez to be out is less the decisions and more the execution and communication. He clearly sucks at PR.

But it may the intent to have him make all the unpopular changes, have him resign with a big payout, and blame him for everything without reversing anything like they did with Ellen Pao.

[dredmorbius]

CEO-as-ablative-shield.

Though usually that's a hired gun (e.g., Pao, Wong) rather than a somewhat-harder-to-replace returned founder.

In retrospect, I think Pao earned a bad and bum rap.

[paulmd]

how do you think the board (any board) feels about a mod clique that is willing to turn a 2-day blackout into an indefinite closure, possibly followed by indefinite "touch grass tuesdays" or other disruptions to business operations?

you're imagining that the board just sees this disruption and wants it over as quickly as possible, but why do you think they would take that view and not want to solve the disruptions in the long-term by removing specific agitators and generally adding additional checks and oversight to the tools they used for their disruption so that it doesn't happen again in the future?

no business is going to let the union sit on the factory floor and disrupt operations - you can strike at the gate all you want, but private property is private property. And when mods end up talking about permanent ongoing intermittent disruption of operations ("touch grass tuesdays") there's not a single board member who is even going to negotiate with that as a potential possibility hanging over their heads. No, you're gone, this is their site and you're being a nuisance.

And this is the point where people start babbling about how mods are irreplaceable and they'd all walk away and leave reddit in the lurch, but it turns out a lot of mods actually just want to get back to it and are being overruled. Let alone if the mod clique was opened up for new membership within their communities - there is inevitably a flood of new applications whenever it's opened. People love being able to push buttons at people, it's a tiny bit of power and that's all it takes.

https://old.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/149z2nd/requ...

Without the blackouts, reddit will be back to normal in 6 months. And that's what terrifies a large portion of the blackout userbase - they know they don't actually have broad enough public support to make it work without forcing other people into it.

It's not the first or the last time a public forum has had a large group of users upset enough to step into disruptive behavior to try and get their way. We could easily see people start launching DDOS attacks or similar as well, it's happened before. Redditors think they're special but from a high-level perspective you're no different from some jilted wikipedian deleting articles or a 4chan user flooding a thread with gore, or DDOS'ing a forum. You're a nuisance, not a freedom fighter, and you're on private property.

The real fun one is going to be if some users escalate things enough that CFAA gets involved. Disruption of service, enjoy your lawsuit/jail time. And causing all requests to go 500 or not return the proper data is still disruption even if the service is still notionally up and responding to pings. Remember, this is a law that makes it illegal to log into a service if the operator wouldn't have wanted you there - using mod tools to disrupt service is still disrupting service!

[DropInIn]

Shareholders need to accept that either:

the mods and community have power and control over operations

Or

Mods get PAID

Really.... Volunteers have a reasonable expectation of influence on how their work is used.

[JohnBooty]

    The analogy for landed gentry is accurate. 

Land is finite and subreddits are not. You can fork off and make your own subreddit whenever you like

If subreddit mods are landed gentry, then so are open source maintainers.

[stcroixx]

Good names that pull traffic by themselves are what is finite. /r/startrek is much more valuable than /r/startrek1234 or any other forked variation.

[faeyanpiraat]

This seems like a broken analogy.

Of course you can make an infinite amount of subs, but with 0 users they would be pointless.

[zarzavat]

Badly moderated subreddits get replaced all the time by better moderated ones. The system is inherently meritocratic: if you abuse your modding power then your community is going leave and go somewhere else.

[lrae]

Subreddit mods abuse their power on the daily. 99.9% of the users just won't care about that as long as they're not the abused ones.

Which is the same spez bets on in the API / 3rd party app situation, which is kind of funny :)

[JohnBooty]

If you're talking about the ginormous default subs, then yeah -- the landed gentry analogy is kind of apt. You can't just make your own alternative to r/pics or whatever and expect to gain traction without some unique angle and a lot of work.

(Although, again, this is how open source works as well. You can't just fork Debian or ffmpeg or Rails and expect a community on Day 1...)

If you're talking about the "long tail" of smaller subs, those get forked/replaced all of the time if there are mod issues or if somebody just has an idea to cover a specific topic from a different angle.

For an example, a lot of people didn't like the moderation tactics of r/audiophile, nor their refusal to look at affordable gear, so some of us made r/budgetaudiophile. We serve different parts of the audience and we cooperate with eachother. And both of us refer headphone-related questions to r/headphones. That is an example of things actually working Extremely Well.

Reddit is in an interesting position. I think its only real value is that long tail. That is where the actual valuable content+community is. The ginormous generalist subs get huge traffic but are utterly disposable - there's no real reason to get your memes or whatever from Reddit vs ICanHazCheezeburger vs random meme-based Facebook group etc etc etc etc etc.

[oh_sigh]

Subreddits may be nearly infinite, but good, descriptive subreddit names are not. r/videos is going to get more natural traffic than r/ReallyCoolNewVideos, which is going to get more natural traffic than r/asdlkajflaksjf.

[mrguyorama]

This is the same website where the "marijuana enthusiast" sub is for people who like trees, right?

[oh_sigh]

Sure, but it's a reddit joke, because r/trees is devoted to marijuana(which exists because of a protest against bad mods on r/marijuana).

Probably non-reddit folk will be turned off by the name, and not get the joke. And I bet a lot of members of that sub only subscribed because they are inveterate redditors and not because they're interested in the subject.

[Drew_]

r/videos gets more natural traffic because it's a default sub. Regardless, making a subreddit isn't some competition. You don't need to be bigger than the subreddit you're forking from.

[Applejinx]

Now that's a solid analogy.

[malermeister]

The board and the investors are not the community though. The community is reddit users, which didn't get to democratically pick him at all.

He's there because rich folks, e.g. actual landed gentry decided he should be, not because the users chose him to lead.

This is democratic in the same way the prince electors system of the HRE was, ie not at all.

[George83728]

Spez is the King, appointed by God (the board). The mods are landed gentry, who rule small fiefdoms (subreddits) at the pleasure of the King. The King doesn't pay them, but as long as they don't upset the King they're allowed to abuse the commoners (arbitrary bans, etc) and extract profit from them (sell out to companies that want control over the moderation of subreddits.)

> The community is reddit users, which didn't get to democratically pick him at all.

You were expecting democracy? From an analogy about feudalism?

[badwolf]

In the rest of the interview, spez goes on about how subreddits should be democratized, and be able to vote for/vote out mods. Perhaps he should take his concept further, and let the community vote for/vote out him and his ideas.

[paulmd]

> The community is reddit users, which didn't get to democratically pick him at all.

This cuts both ways though, mods are not the reddit users either, and users do not get to democratically pick mods either. The guy who squatted the domain name in 2005 is the permanent authority for that keyword, unless there is a specific ToS violation to unseat them.

If you don't want to post, or you don't want to mod, that's fine, log off. There are procedures for abandoned communities/moderation that will be followed and everyone moves on. But you can't shut everything down for everyone else either, and you certainly shouldn't be surprised when the board operator then removes your mod privileges and bans you for disruption of service.

There is no "the community voted to ignore the ToS and allow disruption of service". That's not a thing. Yes, the service is still disrupted even if the server is returning 500, or an empty page, or your protest page. Just like when Greenpeace hacks someone's site, that's still disruptive and illegal.

Be happy you're not being prosecuted under CFAA for denial of service. If logging into the system when the operator wouldn't want you there is so clearly illegal that it regularly results in jailtime for bona-fide security researchers, what do you think CFAA would say about knowingly utilizing mod tools to cause disruption of service and then continuing after being told to knock it off?

And yes, computer crimes are prosecuted quite globally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd.

[isaacremuant]

> The process for selecting moderators is way less meritocratic or democratic than this. They merely got there first, finders keepers. The analogy for landed gentry is accurate.

This is all, of course, a distraction to divide and conquer.

Many mods polled their communities before going dark and there was a lot of support in general.

Hell, very often when mods are too much against the communities interests they migrate to another sub or sabotage it and then mods cave in.

Pretending that "mods are the evil guys that don't speak for the little guy" has to be the stupidest narrative so far and spez shows his extreme dishonesty there.

I thought he would beat the outage by "soldiering on"and letting things play out naturally, since there's no clear and friendly reddit alternative, but he's definitely coming out very aggressively in a manner that could actuslly hurt reddit and him further in the medium and long term.

[rjbwork]

>Hell, very often when mods are too much against the communities interests they migrate to another sub or sabotage it and then mods cave in.

Yup. See /r/marijuana and /r/trees or /r/worldpolitics and /r/anime_titties for examples.

[soraminazuki]

If the best person for a job is a habitual liar who abuses and defames people that helped grow the company, maybe that job shouldn't exist. And somehow, I don't think the CEO's childish attitude is what even the investors hoped for.

[xdennis]

You think it's democratic if the investors picked him? That's not democracy, that oligarchy.

But in both cases I don't think that democracy is what you want. In the case of subreddits, it doesn't matter because you can always create your own subreddit. And in the case of Reddit as a whole, if people stick with the site after this, then they'll deserve the corporatist crap they'll get served.

[edgyquant]

That’s not what an oligarchy is. It’s pretty close to the exact opposite, as an oligarchy is when the government gives individuals (oligarchs) monopolies over industries and enforces them with their monopoly on violence. Really wish people would actually learn the definition of this word instead of throwing it around in place of everything they don’t like.

Oligarchy != rich people existing and doing stuff

[willis936]

I can think of roughly 100,000 people that would be better suited to run reddit than spez.