[Donald]

Reddit is very bizarre right now.

Most of the active users are non-power users who are flummoxed at why mods have shut down their favorite subreddits. They are complaining in droves. Lots of long-winded Facebook boomer-style rants about how they read the subreddit with their kids and they need it back up to entertain them.

Some subs are protesting the spez moderator removal threat by changing the topic of the sub entirely.

Meanwhile, most of the content producers seem to have fled the site and latest high quality serious content is a week old at this point.

I don’t see how Reddit recovers from this without losing a great deal of value for their shareholders. I’m expecting Huffman to resign based on how much he has damaged their monetization potential with advertisers.

[kitsunesoba]

Loss of the primary content creators is serious, more than I think most realize. Without active serious creators you end up with nothing but an endless feed of endlessly recycled memes. Reddit was already trending that direction anyway with repost bots posting almost as much as real users, and creators leaving will only accelerate the process.

[satvikpendem]

> Without active serious creators you end up with nothing but an endless feed of endlessly recycled memes.

This is what drives the most eyeballs to ads though. Reddit simply wants to be like Instagram with memes, not an actual text-based discussion forum.

[Donald]

A lot of their messaging to advertisers revolves around discussing the value proposition of subs like /r/buyitforlife which has 1.5 million users who are likely actively considering a purchase at the moment of viewership, are willing to be convinced to spend more money, and are relatively affluent. Klaje (Reddit’s rev executive) loves talking about trust and positivity of the user base. I’m not sure how that messaging survives if the site moves away from quality content.

[ramraj07]

But now their serious competition is 9gag not quora or some other site. Most of my regular friends started using Reddit not just for the memes but the text based ones (like AITA, BORU) and local subs. Good luck making them look good with a large fraction of creators and good mods leaving.

[satvikpendem]

I don't understand why people talk about the current mods as "good." They were literally chosen the same way future mods would be chosen, by volunteerism. There is no reason to believe future mods would be any less good than current mods. And I should amend my previous statement, text based subs that generate drama also generate ad impressions, ie AITA or BORU. I'm talking about how Reddit is moving away from niche text based communities since those do not generate nearly the same amount of ad impressions.

[noirbot]

Maybe they can replace mods with new volunteers, but Reddit Admins have also just explicitly shown that mods with valid complaints will get no support, may be libeled, and potentially have an admin-led coup done against them if they don't comply.

This is likely to dissuade folks who are in it for the right reasons and want to do a good job with good tooling and proper care and power hungry weirdos who now know that if they disagree with the Admins, the Admins have shown they can weather any storm and don't care if any user, even powerful mods, disagree with them.

I'm not sure why anyone would decide to be a mod at this point. Before this month, it was a chance to run your own corner of the internet, for better or worse. Now it's been made very clear who actually runs the show, and that those people could not care any less about you.

[boolemancer]

No, the current mods were picked by 15 years of natural selection, where mods that don't care about their role have had the potential to get bored and leave or have their community migrate to a different subreddit that more matches what that community wants.

Antagonizing a large swathe of your volunteer-base of active mods all at once and then replacing them with new mods who seem fine with that antagonistic behavior is not going to select for the same group of people.

[satvikpendem]

> Meanwhile, most of the content producers seem to have fled the site and latest high quality serious content is a week old at this point.

I highly doubt this, most content producers explicitly can't post their content because their subs are restricted or private, eg AskHistorians.

> I don’t see how Reddit recovers from this without losing a great deal of value for their shareholders. I’m expecting Huffman to resign based on how much he has damaged their monetization potential with advertisers.

No, this is great for shareholders as it explicitly removes users using apps that are not able to show Reddit ads.

[ramraj07]

I’m an avid Redditor and have been for a decade. I just stopped using it since the blackout. Turns out life is fine without it. Occasionally I go into it when I have a specific question or something but that’s it. Screw that site and these myopic CEOs who think they’re Elon Musk 2.0. I doubt I’m the only big contributor to do this. Whether the subs come back or not, I give Reddit a mere 50% chance of being able to survive this long term. Eat this shareholders, for leaving an idiot on as CEO.

[satvikpendem]

Again, shareholders explicitly love this action by the CEO. As for survival rate, it depends on your definition of longterm but every social network eventually dies. Most people simply don't care about the internal politics of a company whose social network they're using. For all of Facebook's scandals, they still have 3 billion monthly active users.

[ramraj07]

Maybe myopic share holders sure. There’s no way a logical person would think this is going to increase their returns on this company. Alienating your top creators is not a great strategy.

As for your Facebook analogy, I don’t buy it. Every young person I know (less than 45 yo) both in US and India maybe logs into FB once a month to see if someone in their extended life got married or bit the bullet. That’s it. The 3 billion number seems to be some clever accounting to me. I agree that between instagram and WhatsApp they have covered most people however, but not by just Facebook. And I’d argue that’s not necessarily because they alienated their users actively anyway. Not like Reddit is doing now.

[mardifoufs]

Users being mad at mods that think that they own communities that aren't theirs? Shocking! What a bunch of boomers, they should just let the mods get their powertrip! It's not like they are volunteers that could just... Go away if they dont want to moderate the community anymore.

(Again, moderators do not own the subreddits, they can't unilaterally close it. I mean, they can, but they can't be surprised if they lose mod rights. The funny thing is that they are all reopening now that they might actually lose their little fiefdom. Random readers being affected didn't matter to them, but once there was even a hint that they could lose their online janitor status they quickly caved in. Very very selfless)

[majewsky]

> Users being mad at mods that think that they own communities that aren't theirs?

This is one of these places where the concept of "ownership" falls apart, at least in the monolithic ownership. A community consists of users, mods, and the platform operator. As soon as one of these components defects, the community is destroyed. So really the community as an entity can only exist when all three sides cooperate, which makes the question of who owns it somewhere between unhelpful and nonsensical.