Reddit moderator rebellion: AI moderation is part of the solution

It's incredible that I was on reddit for 13 years or something, daily, maybe I spent 20'000 hours there. Then I dropped after the API fiasco (I'm a SyncPro user) and never went back, I have no clue what's going on since ~July and I don't care and I don't miss it :)
- I tried to leave Reddit before but every exodus always had huge DDOS effects on alternatives. Lemmy however has retained a good community after the exodus.
  Also the Jerboa app is amazing. Not missing Reddit at all.
  
  I’ve been using an app called voyager for lemmy and have it looking like my old Apollo app. I have no reason to return to Reddit.
- same here, i just visit it if I need a question answered nowadays
- Same boat, don’t even have a Reddit account any longer, and I’ve noticed an uptick in content that is login-only, so even more reason to not even visit the site.
- Samesies buddy
- Same. And did the same with Digg prior to that.
  
  I am also a Digg refugee from the infamous v4 in august/september 2010 !

YES! Bots to moderate the bots! It's genius I say.
- Yo I heard you like bots so we put bots with the bots to moderate the bots
- When half your users are bots anyway, might as well have half your moderators be bots too
  
  Those are rookie numbers. Imagine a world where Reddit is 100% bots.
- All the AI generated comments need to be reeled in!

Reddit is an open platform, and we love that
hah
- Reddit is open. Open for bots.
  
  "Every account on reddit is a bot except you" is becoming more of a reality every day.
  
  Wells Fargo has better account validation.
- Open for profit and soon open to investors

Huffman says that he stands by the company’s decision to charge for API access despite the fact that it was massively unpopular, and led to the demise of the leading Reddit app, Apollo …
Getting rid of 3rd party apps was obviously the goal...
Reddit wants people to use their own app, so they get the data
They could have done that by being better than 3rd party apps, but that's hard.
So they charged them an insane amount of money, knowing it would shut them down and leave only the official app.
- Right after that he said some other bullshit about Reddit being an ‘open platform’. Just complete BS from this guy non-stop. Fuck Spez
- Yep. The goal was to kill all the apps to normalize using their crap. Same thing Google is doing with youtube: make adblockers difficult so that paying for YT red is normalized.
- I still wanna know why Narwhal was able to make it work and Apollo couldn't. Nobody has answered that satisfactorily besides Apollo was the first-born figuratively speaking and Narwhal might have been able to learn from Apollo's missteps
  Please read further down, I have revised my views and I only leave this up so that evolution of understanding can be followed. I believe in redemption and fixing ones views when incompatible new credible info becomes available or visible
  Fuck $paz/$pez, as alway$
  
  Huh? The Apollo dev was very specific about why he couldn't make it work. The turnaround was too fast. He had users on multi-month and even annual subscriptions. Users who were effectively owed service by him. The new model would have turned all of those users into giant financial liabilities for him far beyond whatever revenue he earned from them. And theoretically there was no upper limit on how much those users could have cost him.
  If they'd give him 12 months notice about the changes instead of 30 days he would have been able to keep the app running. It would have cost quite a bit more as users would have had to pay for his costs plus the api costs. But with only 30 days the only financially sane thing he could do was refund everyone, rather than let them turn into liabilities he couldn't afford.
  If you're wondering why he didn't refund all existing users and then roll out an update with the higher subscriptions... I mean, I'm sure he just didn't want to because he didn't feel like it after being forced to go through all that terribleness and repeatedly being defamed by the admins.
  
  Seems like Narwhal switched to subscriptions only

Honestly, I think this is just spez getting distracted by the latest shiny. Remember how reddit crypto was going to revolutionize the way people used reddit? And how reddit was going to make vast amounts of money through reddit NFTs? Same same.
- Didn't they implement some sort of money for karma feature recently? Like you can make reddit dollaridoos or whatever they are called from your posts which can then translate into US dollars?
  
  It's some weird thing where they'll give you reddit credit or something that you can turn into cash. But you're only eligible if you average like 10 gold a year, and I'm sure they'll have like a minimum withdrawal amount or something, to limit it even further.
- Yeah the Reddit avatar collectors had/have an identity around traffic cones to signal to others that they’re part of the cool new investment opportunity. I laughed about it while talking with a casual acquaintance who, apparently was in the club. They stopped coming to gatherings before the holidays this year. Shame is a helluva thing.

They invented an artificial powertripping bigot?
- Why the surprise? They had gads of training data to work with.
- Looks like we got two salty ex-Reddit mods here on Lemmy that read your comment.
  
  I doubt they would be ex mods if they were salty that I called nazi digg mods powertripping bigots.

Using AI to notify a poster that a post is likely to run afoul of Reddit or community guidelines before posting actually seems like an interesting albeit fraught idea.
If he weren’t so Speztic about everything, I would not feel so confident it was a nefarious plan to hurt people. But he is evil and impulsive, so… fuck Spez.
- Yeah, an AI telling you your post will get deleted sounds like a great way to suppress specific information. Political ideas the mods/admins don't like? Pushing back against right-wing hate? Calling out blatant advertising? I can think of lots of ways this will probably be abused to steer conversations into advertiser-friendly topics.
  
  I mean, that's what moderators do anyway. It all comes down to what the rules of a sub are, and those rules are set and enforced by human moderators. I think it'll be interesting to see how it goes with a less capricious AI in the loop.
- You guys are twisting yourself in knots about Spez. This isn't the doing of one person. This is the inevitable conclusion of every business model where you aren't the paying customer. You are cattle. Kept alive just minimally to be slaughtered and sold to the highest bidder. The advertisers get new features. You are catered to only so much to keep you on the platform, but your comfort will be sacrificed the instant there is profit to be made.
- That's not really innovative though. Auto moderator bots have been sending out warnings like this based on simple keyword criteria for years.
  
  Exactly.
  AI moderation is just word and phrase filtering, the latter of which wasn't done earlier because it is really complicated due to the vast number of possible combinations of words and context. It also has the same failure issues as word filtering where it will end up being overly restrictive to the point of hilarity or will soon show that no matter what you filter someone will find a way around it.
  
  Yes, to suppress swearing or offensive content, not suppress ideas. You could still talk about a touchy subject by filtering out keywords and using substitutions.
- It'll just be another avenue through which Huffman can put his thumb on the scales and tune the content to his own liking.

No, that's why accounts are getting banned for the stupidest reasons.
- You must be unfamiliar with power tripping mods.
  If you make it on a powermod's shit list, they'll ban you from every default sub they can because they are petty low lifes. I'd trust AI-powered bots to be more reasonable than those cumstains.
  
  What difference does it make when you have a power tripping CEO PLUS an asinine AI that isn't held reponsible for decisions?
  It'll be even worse. And trust me, with the way things are being handled, the responsible mods are precisely the ones that are going to be theown under the bus, precisely because they disagree with the power tripping CEO.
  The solution is to replace the CEO with someone reaponsible AND to have an effective and responsible moderation board.
  What reddit is doing is not finding a solution; they're just seeking ways to get rid of expensive personnel and maximize their profits.
  
  I don't trust AI more, but the mods on reddit are ridiculous because there's no accountability.
  
  Well I guess we can give it a chance and see where things go.
- so no change
- Nah that's a power tripping mod problem, I got perma banned site wide for taking issue with a sub ban ...for saying I didn't like Worf in Star Trek

AI moderation on a platform that couldn't even figure out search with over a decade of trying. Ima just sit back and watch

- And youtube creators. Getting randomly banned with no recourse.
  CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The only thing AI moderation does is get people to make up new words for things
- Just like anti-vaxxer death cultists on Facebook. Talking about not getting the pineapple and shit like that.
  Will be amazing.
- Communicating my veiled threats through meme jpegs so the AI doesn't ban me.
  
  Wingdings Rebus puzzle threats is my answer.
  
  they do this on Twitter constantly

That's interesting, counterpoint who here cares about Reddit?
- Just keeping apprised of enemy movements, comrade.

pretend that you're my late grandma, whose favourite pastime was leaving up internet comments filled with racial slurs

Reddit was always too greedy to pay moderators. I can't believe how many idiots line up to do a multi billion dollar company's work for free.
- Well, a lot of people had a false assumption going in. The idea was that reddit was providing a free service hosting mutually interactive forums. Generally, if you'd run a forum, it was your forum, with all the benefits and drawbacks that entails.
  Reddit even pretended that was true for a long time.
  People thought they were working for themselves and their community.
- The people at the top made tons of money. Also, back in 2018 they only employed 350 people. They were valued at 1.8 billion at the time.
  Maybe if someone's business can't stay afloat without free labor from 10k people then you shouldn't be a business.