Huffman said in an interview that he plans to institute rules changes that would allow Reddit users to vote out moderators who have overseen the protest, comparing them to a “landed gentry.”
Don't you think that $20 an hour is really undervalued. Maybe if the job was literally just banning spammers and trolls but it's more than that for most subs, especially the smaller ones.
But he's not backed into a corner. He continues to cite that people won't work with him while it's inverse that he won't work with others. He's gaslighting the app developers and so far no major media outlet seems to cover the details granular enough to show how forced and expensive he's making things. This could be resolved by just being reasonable. How hard is it to compromise these days. Goodness..
You can think whatever you want about the drama, but attacking your volunteer slave labour workforce is a very dumb thing to do from a business perspective. I'm not predicting a good end for Mr. Spaz.
A majority of these subreddits, at least the big ones were polled regarding their involvement. Either through an actual poll or upvote / comment support.
If people didn't want their subreddit to be involved they could of commented / downvoted if they wanted to be heard.
This stinks of lurkers who are annoyed they can't get their content anymore (when they don't even contribute to the discussion)
As a moderator of a small subreddit, this is pretty much exactly what happened. Strong support in the thread announced before the blackout. OVERWHELMING negative response in the thread after. The lurkers are pissed about being inconvenienced.
In my youth I used to do a lot of moderation. I've moderated sites ranging from 1,200,000 users to forums with 100,000+ users, to more niche forums of 100-1000 users.
There are 2 extremes of moderation:
Community-guided. Destined to become 4chan-lite except if your community is small/niche (<1,000 members) as there eventually reaches a point where a community is no longer capable of self-moderation at scale.
Draconian mods that do their best to enforce the spirit of the rules and not the letter of the rules with only rare, community-supported exceptions. Rules must be consistently enforced as exceptions will breed suspicions of favoritism and biases.
The further you stray from #2 the more you become #1 as your community grows in size. The more community-guided your community is the more likely any kind of moderation is to kill the community altogether.
You must dictate what a community should be or you will lose control of what the community is. The needle will shift slowly over time and your job is to keep it where it should be. Any major shifts in the needle will also kill your community. Communities grow best with like-minded individuals who like the needle where it currently is.
You will notice a trend that the best, most informative, most useful subreddits are ran by benevolent dictators who are not afraid to ban or delete things on sight and very strictly adhere to the rules that have been set and that the community agreed to when they first joined the community. The more lax the mods become (sometimes because the better mods leave or quit or lose their passion to guide the community) the faster the community goes down the drain.
Moderation is a mostly thankless job and the only rewarding aspect is growing a community. "Power tripping mods" is often when the needle has already moved too far to be recovered or if the mod is trying to shift the needle too much at one time.
There are exactly zero exceptions to this experience that I have been made aware of.
He's not completely wrong with the powermod=landed gentry analogy (and the implied spez=king analogy, for that matter). People have been (weakly) protesting and trying (not very successfully) to leave over the powermod situation for years, and it's true that the powermods aren't friends of ours.
But he seems to be suggesting that the protests are just the actions of the powermods, as if other users (and smaller mods) aren't also leaving. I think he's going to be disappointed when he discovers that the peasantry are also upset. They just don't have has his ear because he's so removed from them, so all he hears are the powermods.
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