As some subreddits continue blackouts to protest Reddit's plans to charge high prices for its API, Reddit has informed the moderators of those subreddits that it has plans to replace resistant moderation teams to keep spaces "open and accessible to users."
I think Lemmy looks a bit more manageable but the people running it seem slightly concerning. I don't want to get attached to a place just to leave again.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of them either so that's why I joined different instances. Beehaw has been a really good one but I was enjoying lemmy.world before this account too.
I'm the opposite haha, I think Kbin has some cool communities and stuff but I way prefer the look of Lemmy. To each their own! Beauty of the fediverse is that we can choose our own platform but still interact 😄
Funny how he repeatedly uses phrases such as “the extent that they were profiting off of our API” but has never used the phrase “the extent that we rely on freely provided content and freely provided moderation. If it weren’t for the tens of millions of people who are giving us free stuff we wouldn’t even exist.”
I have yet to profit a single dime off of Reddit. After over ten years (11th Cake Day is coming up), and nothing to show for it but piles of worthless Karma.
I'm deleting all my free content off reddit. It's not particularly exciting content, but I have answered a few questions people probably ask on Google (recipes, cleaning tips, etc) that will now be gone. Just gotta back up my most important stuff first
I nuked the past several years of gif making from my account. Felt like slicing out a troublesome family member and it still weirdly hurts to have done that.
It's pretty obvious they're given free reign until they happen to disagree with admins and then it's "they're holding subreddits hostage", "they're just Stewarts" etc
Reddit admins will legitimately say and do anything to frame this as not their own fuck up
allow ordinary users to vote moderators out more easily if their decisions aren’t popular. He said the new system would be more democratic and allow a wider set of people to hold moderators accountable.
Oh, I know this one! A bunch of Nazis are going to get together, vote out the mods of transgender/gay/Jewish subreddits, and turn them into uber-right-wing hate parades.
The most likely thing i'm expecting is people will vote out the r/adviceanimals /wholesomememes mod because of how much it was advertised that he took over the subreddit from the original mods.
Then they will put him back and disable the vote feature.
Optionally it just immediately becomes found out that certain mods can't be voted out to begin with
Lol one of the 10 AMA questions he answered linked to a meme making fun of him.
If he used a functional app that showed links, he could have noticed and not embarassed himself. But because he used the trash Reddit puts out, he had no idea.
I like the concept, and so far I like the implementation, but it's still far too early to gain mass adoption based on what I'm seeing from bugs (account creation silently failed on multiple instances, and login can also silently fail) as well as how registering can feel like jumping through hoops. I wanted to register for beehaw but don't much care to go through an interview process. Then I wanted to make sure I could access beehaw content, but saw they recently defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, so I had to make sure not to register on either of those.
I don't know this will catch on. Currently each instance is so small, and the communities are even smaller. I worry that content won't update often enough to warrant checking more than once or twice a day. We'll have to wait and see how much this all grows and matures. I'd like this to be my Reddit replacement, but we'll see.
I'm tempted to say it's better, but, unfortunately, in many ways it's not.
What Reddit had, most of the time, was semi-canonical communities. There was /r/python, /r/linux, /r/privacy, etc. The diaspora of Lemmy is a shadow of all of that. Surely, there are a dozen or so (at least) /c/python communities on Lemmy, but is there a single one that's anywhere near as active as the Reddit one? No. Not so far, at least.
And unfortunately, I can say as an instance admin, the lemmy moderation tools are just flat bad. We had to turn off open registration and enable email verification, not because we would otherwise need it, but the Lemmy moderation tools are 100% reactive and only operate on a 1-by-1 basis. If a spambot signs up 100 fake accounts, I have to go and individually ban each and every one of them. There's no shift+select, ban.
Don't get me wrong. I'm glad to be here, and Lemmy's great, and there's far less toxicity (so far). All I'm saying is, (1) there's work to do, (2) don't gloat.
We're not there yet, imho, but Reddit definitely feels like damaged goods, and the atmosphere has gotten toxic and polarized. So I think we're going to see a slow decline, unless they somehow get their community management back in order, but the recent comments by the CEO seem to suggest he sees the community as cattle, basically.
Reddit was pretty unpolished when I joined 13? years ago. There is something awesome about being on a frontier where posts are getting 20 comments instead of 2,000. Everybody gets a chance to contribute and be heard.
Stop giving thus self righteous, money hungry dickwad a voice, The Verge. Jesus christ. The more he talks, the dumber and more like Elon Musk he looks.
Everyone needs to realise it doesnt matter. Enough people already came to lemmy for us to carry on without reddit. Now we just do the normal long haul work - help users who need help so people start searching lemmy for tech solutions, post our normal content here so there is a reason to stay, upvote and comment others work so there is engagement. The rest will follow as this grows and grows. We have already won. Lemmy is no longer a fringe interest.
I feel like another critical change happened, and that is that Reddit's users views of themselves changed. The idea that we are giving Reddit free content and labor so they can profit from it is spreading around.
An ugly underlayer has been laid bare and many are finding they don't really like it.
Im not here to hunger strike from reddit until i get hungry. Im willing to hunger strike till i die. Fortunatly lemmy seems to be a source of nourishment but ive made my decision.
Agreed, I have moved on. Lemmy is at the place now that it feels more like what the Internet should be. It feels more personal and tight knit. By the end with reddit, I felt so much like a tiny fish in a gigantic pond that it felt completely pointless to comment on anything.
Lemmy is a “ground floo” for the next random tidbits of knowledge aggregator. And I don’t mean that as Lemmy is new, but rather it’d the next port-of-call and mature enough to be engaging while not being entrenched in decades’ old procedures.
I’m excited. I logged off Reddit when Christian shuttered Apollo, signed up on Beehaw and never looked back.
The changes are coming at a good enough clip that it feels like it's worth taking a stand here. Even if things don't feel like reddit yet, we're getting there. Enough people leave and they'll have a pool of content consumers and no creators and that's a fast ticket to a quick death.
Yeah, moderating a large sub isn’t as shake-and-bake as the admins seem to think. They might “hire” scabs, but the scabs are probably going to slack off pretty hard and might not even understand the tools and procedures that can make it effective but not stifling to content.
Simply replacing all the mods sound like a good way to kill a subreddit, Reddit probably has no way to pick good mods... Mods will need some connection with the topic, and you don't want to pick random users with no experience for large subreddits.
get ready for sudden and radical rule changes, non enforcement of rules, nsfw, bots, spam, all kinds of fun crazy shit in the subs with mods removed. I'm sure a percentage of subs would stay the same, but I don't think that percentage is very high.
Man, I was mod for a tiny subreddit for a TV show that was niche. We still got slammed with bots, nsfw, spam, etc. I can't imagine what the big subs are like, and I laugh at Reddit trying to insert their people into that situation.
Would still be poetic justice. Remember when they threw Ellen Pao under the bus? They forgot to hire a scapegoat for this round of unpopular decisions.
Good luck with that! I'm excited to see the fireworks as their brand-new mod teams use their brand-new mod tools right as they go public. Should be quite a show.
And on top of that when those "tools" don't materialize and they're more overworked than previous mods having to manually squash bots and alt right trolls, even more will bail.
It's not that they're for this specifically... It's that they are send centered. They're the same 75% of the population that is willing to cross the picket line at Starbucks cuz they want their coffee. They don't think about the workers rights, they only care about coffee.
The same people just want memes and football and porn. They don't care about what's behind the scenes unless it directly impacts them. And let's be honest, the reddit changes (for now) impact like 10% of reddits user base. That's not enough for them to give up some dumb memes for
I think what will happen is that a lot of the subs are eventually going to end up in the hands of the few mods who love sucking up to the admins and the mods who are in it for the dopamine they gain power-tripping instead of the mods who are in it to make the subreddit the best version of itself.
I was a mod on a big sub for awhile many years ago and it was a literal horrowshow every day. It was an endless torrent that never stopped, the mod team basically ran 24/7. It was guaranteed you would see at least some fucked up bigotry every time you looked in the queue because the sub was a regular target for those people. It was really just a nonstop firehose of all the worst the internet has to offer, one reported Reddit comment at a time, forever. The tools I had access to were janky browser plugins and things like that, stuff previous mods had built themselves years before because the actual Reddit tools were inadequate. The sub involved so much moderation the team was very organized and you had to put in a certain amount of work every month, it really was like a part time job where you get to set your own hours but can be "fired" for slacking. You often feel emotionally drained afterwards just like a real job, and you start feeling anxious when you "clock in" because fuck not this same miserable bullshit yet again, just like a real job. I have so much respect for quality moderation, it is not at all easy in any way.
I don't really have enough experience with them yet to have specific thoughts but my impression is they are very basic currently and need a lot of work. One thing that's really important is being able to do bulk actions against multiple users quickly. I remember the times when big attacks would happen and we would have a sudden flood of obvious problem users posting comments blatantly intended to cause disruptions, being able to efficiently respond in the moment to that scenario can be really important. It sucks when the mod team lacks the ability to respond quickly because in the meantime users trying to have a real conversation end up getting harassed, angered, and driven away with the impression the mods are worthless. You don't want to have to fight your tools and spend a bunch of time per individual action because by the time you get to dealing with the full swarm of trolls the conversation might have really taken a turn or be basically over so you end up cleaning things up after it doesn't make much difference for the users. Also, bots like automod are extremely useful and important so I would say the fediverse needs them ASAP. I never messed with the bots when I was mod but they were definitely like a force multiplier for the mod team.
@coldredlight@rysiek It seems to me that search would be critical. An ideal workflow during a flood might look like:
Search for a particular keyword (or regular expression 🤩)
Multi-select relevant comments
Optionally: Review list of the associated usernames, possibly annotated with account age etc. and allow deselecting any that were accidentally included
One-click ban + remove recent comments of all users in list.
@rysiek@coldredlight@peyotecosmico from my experience modding on Facebook, the things I most often wished for were just better views of incoming comments. Being able to sort and group by time on a certain post, for example, and then filter that list by keyword so I can take bulk actions.
Being able to restrict who can comment on a post helps a LOT. The amount of harassment I had to deal with dropped significantly when I could change a post to only accounts over a certain age, for example.
With all the time and effort mods like yourself put into looking after subs, does Reddit not have at the very least a way of publicly rewarding moderators that do some much work keeping subs running? I know fellow Redditors can hand out ‘rewards’ but something directly from Reddit would show the community how much mods are appreciated and required.
Not that I'm aware of, but this was many years ago now so things could be different. I personally wouldn't have wanted any kind of public reward because that can paint a target, you get direct messages from problem users and other issues that come with recognition. I never publicly mentioned being a mod anywhere on Reddit, it was one of the things the mod team warned new mods about because trolls and other problem users will start targeting you directly once they see that you're a mod.
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