I'm not a moderator of any subreddits. Never have been. But, the whole Steve referring to mods as "landed gentry", along with some of his other comments, made it clear to me that he does not understand his own platform.
Mods go a long way in terms of keeping subs high quality. It's a thankless job that pays nothing. Larger social media platforms (i.e. Facebook) have to spend lots of money to do content moderation. Reddit gets much of that for free.
I don't think the average Reddit user base is going to be to ruffled by the API changes. But destroying your own content moderation (that costs you next to nothing) from the inside out? That's a stupid decision from basically every angle. Now they either have to pay people to do content moderation, pray they can find people that care enough about the remaining subs to do it for free, or devolve into a giant shit hole which will definitely alienate the average user.
I understand needing to offset the costs of the API. But this situation seems like it's being handled so poorly that the fallout from Reddit/Steve's response to the pushback over the API changes will damage Reddit far more than the API changes themselves in the long term.
This is it! The point is not just the 3rd party apps. They are just treating us as trash, and want to turn Reddit into something like Twitter or Facebook. Well go ahead, but people will migrate, and for a site that depends totally on the users, that's rough
Spez really doesn't understand the art of shutting the hell up. He shouldn't have done the AMA and should stop talking to the news, he's just adding more fuel to the fire.
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