#redditmigration#reddit One of my friends is a mod of a very large subreddit that went private for the blackout. Last night she received a message saying that she had been stripped of her moderator rights and the subreddit was taken public again. To be very clear, the subreddit members had specifically voted in favor of going private. It seems like reddit will stoop lower and lower to try and break the blackout. I'm seething.
IMPORTANT: I have talked to this mod one on one, they are in my server. I'll refer to them as T. What we were told is that T doesn't know exactly who demodded them, just that the top mods did not agree to the protest (they are inactive power mods, one of them mods 60+ subs), and when T made the sub read-only because the members of the sub voted to go private, they were demodded. Then the sub went private anyway for unknown reasons (speculated it was to quell the drama after mods got caught removing T's comments). We do not know, nor did anyone or T say that this has something to do with admins.
This is the nature of Reddit. There's potential conflict from any mod who has seniority over you, as well as the top level admins. When we hear stories of this, we need to be able to definitively qualify whether it was just a higher level mod, or actually a Reddit admin. Two entirely different things.
Might just be me, but I find it baffling that the concept of seniority exists among mods because ??? what's the point lol aren't they all there to do the same thing?
The point is that mods are not infallible and can go off the deep end; without an ability to remove them it could lead to any mod being able to single handedly kill a sub. Seniority works simply based on when one was modded, the earliest mod has the most seniority. This means that only the top mod could do great harm unchecked, rather than any of the many mods a sub may have being able to.
Subs will also have differing levels of moderators, where some mods won't have the ability to remove others.
But the admin generally don't let them do that. TodayILearned had a blow-up a few days ago when one of the mods was caught yet again approving his own inappropriate posts. The top mod, who is active on reddit, but not in the sub, finally had enough, demodded him, another crappy mod tried to defend the first, got himself demodded and the top mod decided enough was enough and shut the sub down because no one wanted to enforce standards. It wasn't half a day and the admins removed his privileges.
Any system will have scenarios like this. Requiring a majority of mods could lead to gridlock if enough mods stop being active. User vote would be prone to abuse by brigading or bots.
Seniority is the simplest: you make the sub, it's yours. The escape hatch is either Admin action or someone else making their own sub with blackjack and hookers.
I agree, but just before the blackout started I remember the mods of r/tumblr saying they weren't going to go private because they were afraid of exactly this stating something similar had happened to them before? I don't have any more context than that, but it did seem odd at the time. I'm more surprised to find out they decided to go private after all.
This sounds like bait to be honest. The fact that of all subreddits they would start with Tumblr rather than one of the “defaults” doesn’t make much sense. Also the whole “I’m seething” thing just sounds like trolling.
having their IP and email addresses scanned by the admin team
This sounds like dialog from a 1980s hacker movie.
Reddit knows your IP address any time you connect to them. They know your email address if you gave it to them.
They don't need to (and wouldn't) "scan" your IP address.
I don't even know what you might be implying by "scanning" an email address, but again it's poppycock.
That said...
Reddit is relatively good at banning a person when they want to. They have a number of indicators they look for, and when someone signs up for a new account they can either immediately ban the new account or flag it. If the new account posts to a subreddit the old account was banned from, a "possible ban evasion" flag pops up for the subreddit's moderators. (The mods don't get your IP and aren't notified which "old" account the "new" account is suspected of being affiliated with.)
Sitewide suspensions for single users are mostly IP based.
I can confirm this. Reddit will helpfully "connect" accounts with same IP address. So if a family member or ex roommate or stranger using the same public IP address or temporary IP address and they get banned for any reason you are banned too. But you won't know you are banned on a sub until you innocently post on that sub. Then you get a strike. 3 strikes and you are permanently banned. First 2 are 3 day and 7 day bans for every account. Of course none of that prevents anybody who was banned (legit banned or random banned) for getting around it. All it does is subtract value and degrade the entire site.
I don't really care about the API thing, but I want reddit to die and be replaced, because it is terribly mismanaged. Almost every "exiting improvement" they have added over the last 10 years has subtracted value from the site.
Proof would be good but honestly this seems pretty likely. Power users like mods are going to want the account recoverability so they're mostly going to be using authenticated accounts tied to real emails. And reddit sure isn't going to want them coming back to stir up their users. If I were reddit trying to double down this is absolutely a step I'd take.
If I was a scumball who was in charge of Reddit (but I repeat myself), I might do it to just one prominent mod of a large subreddit like this in a way that couldn't be proven. That would cause rumors to fly and make the other mods start fearing "am I next?", while at the same time having deniability.
I'm not saying that's definitely what happened, mind you. Just speculating on why a scenario like this might make sense.
There are probably companies who specialize into fingerprinting and who will provide a module for reddit admins. Even the resolution of your screen or the firefox extensions you use can betray you.
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Powerhungry mods causing trouble on Reddit? Oh no! Anyway, it is expected that when the cracks turn big enough and you can see it, it'll be ugly - very ugly.
I mean so what's the end game here? remove the top 5% of subs mods and replace them with... who? the people who would make quality mods of the biggest subs are already the mods of them, and it's not like having stooges replace them will make the problem with mod tools etc go away... so you're left with either a revolving door of quality mods that burn out because you took away the thing that made it bearable, or a bunch of idiots who screw up the sub, hard to see how either is a win from a community standpoint or an IPO one tbh
I typed a long response but it seems to have disappeared.
It wouldn't be hard for Reddit to find sympathetic mods to jump in. Any mods of big subs that didn't participate in the blackout would likely be thrilled to grow their empires.
If necessary, Reddit could throw some interns or some contract employees at the problem. A huge part of the job moderating the giant subs is removing spam and other obvious rule violations. It doesn't take specialized training to check a report to see if it is accurate and click ban/remove/approve.
The parts of moderating a sub that do take special skill -- the parts related to growing and tending a community through thoughtful application of subreddit specific rules and norms -- will not be missed in the million+ subscriber subreddits in the short-to-mid term. r/funny and r/TikTokCringe and whatever other giant subs don't really have any quality standards to speak of anyway.
Someone wrote about this in another thread. The problem with interns or contract employees is that they would be reddit employees and reddit would be responsible for their actions. As of now (i think) reddit is only responsible for the actions of a normal mod after they got a information about wrong behaviour.
With no actual info/argument to go on, I can only assume that was based on a misunderstanding of Section 230 protections.
Some people think social media sites are only protected if they exert no influence over content. This is kind of how it works with DMCS "safe harbor" protections for ISPs.
Online platforms are within their First Amendment rights to moderate their online platforms however they like, and they’re additionally shielded by Section 230 for many types of liability for their users’ speech. It’s not one or the other. It’s both.
I've found that when typing long replies kbin.social can time-out on its cloudflare protection, and clicking the "add comment" button does nothing. It's necessary to refresh the page, or open another kbin.social page in another tab, to get it to refresh the cloudflare protection at which point the add comment button works again. Might be what happened to your long response.
I got lucky once when I pressed the back button on my browser and my comment was still there. Until this instance stabilizes and reduces the need for cloudflare, I think it's good practice to copy the entire comment before submitting it.
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