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No apologies as Reddit halfheartedly tries to repair ties with moderators

Reddit is reaching out to moderators after tensions rose over recent policy changes and API pricing. A Reddit admin acknowledged the strained relationship and outlined new weekly feedback sessions and other outreach efforts to repair ties. However, moderators remain skeptical of Reddit's efforts given mixed results from past initiatives. Many mods feel Reddit has been unwilling to make meaningful changes to address their concerns like more accessible API pricing or exemption for accessibility apps. After a tumultuous few months, moderators have very low expectations that Reddit's latest efforts will result in real changes.

80 comments
  • Forum management 101

    Lesson One:

    1% of your readers produce 99% of your content.

    Only about 1% of the population producing content is interested in enduring the shitshow of toxicity that comes with moderation.

    Don't piss them off.

    End of Lesson

    • Honestly it's amazing they even stayed around at all even before the site itself started fucking around. They start shit as a hobby, probably not even imagining it blowing up and becoming popular. Dealing with all the garbage and bullshit people on the internet have to offer. Then again, that's thinking they made the community to have discussions; not control them.

      • Yeah - I ran a public forum as part of a publishing non-profit for about 12 years, so I've got nothing but sympathy for the mods.

        Feel like telling a bit of what it was like, so here goes.

        We got a fraction of the traffic Reddit did and the moderation was without a doubt the most difficult and least rewarding part of the effort - took up between 50% - 90% of our time, depending on how pissed off particular users were.

        I finally gave up after the third wave of Turkish hackers (who were pissed that we had posted pictures of a broken window from a riot in Cyprus) hit us in a wave of spam accounts, ddos attacks, and finally hacked our shared service provider (I was soooo pissed about this, as I'd spend months hardening our site from their previous attacks, and I'd been relying on our hosting provider to have their backend secure) to hijack the website. I'm pretty sure they were Edrogan funded with a mandate, as the picture was really innocuous and their response to it was completely over the top. We were a small art & literature website. I can only imagine what mods on Reddit go through on a daily basis.

  • Then why are they even still there? It's like they're so addicted to the small amount of irrelevant "power" they get from the position and they just can't give it up.

    • I get that the tin pot dictator narrative is popular wrt subreddit mods, but it really isn't a useful model for understanding people's behaviour.

      Fear of change, denial of loss, and sunk cost are all much more powerful tools for understanding.

      • Yea I'm trying to get a few Lemmy communities running but I'm planning to leave the mod teams once they get going and more experienced people join. A few seem ready for that already

        I don't think the vast majority of mods are in it for the power lol

      • Plus there are plenty of subs that strongly benefit from the population size or promence of reddit - very niche interests, smaller city or town subs, etc.

        And there are some subs where the archive of past material is a huge drawcard - for example AskHistorians which is almost certainly the best single reason for reddit existing and the best modded sub I know of.

      • Right, so you were a mod and you don't like people calling out your behavior. Got it.

        This ain't a "narrative," it's my (and many many others') personal experience with every mod that I'd encountered on that site.

    • This is such a cynical take. Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of moderators do care about their subreddits or else they wouldn't be volunteering their free time. The allure of the power to remove some random person's post on the Internet, or to ban them just so they return with another account, pales in comparison to the thrill of watching your community grow and people having fun because of it. And it's not this weird selfish, hey-look-at-me-I'm-so-successful kind of thrill, it's like you joined this thing because you are interested it and now all these other people who are also interested in it are there talking about it. That's what's cool, you set off to make this place where people can talk about this thing that you think is cool and you get to watch it grow and be successful over time. Some of these communities have been around for over a decade, so, people have invested time and effort into them for over a decade.

      Moving to elsewhere isn't really as easy as people make it out to be. At the moment "moving communities" means fracturing your community as there is no unified approach to doing this.

      The operative word being "unified" which is next to impossible to achieve. If you get all mods to agree you will have a hard time reaching all your users. This in itself presents the biggest roadblock, ideally you'd close up shop and redirect users to the new platform. Reddit will most certainly not allow this, their approach to protesting subreddits that were not even aiming to migrate made that abundantly clear.

      So this means that, at the very least, you are looking at splitting your community over platforms. This is far from a unified approach.

      This isn't even touching on the lack of viable long term platforms out there. I'd love for people to move to Lemmy. But realistically speaking Lemmy is very immature, instance owners are confronted with new bugs every day, not to mention the costs of hosting an instance. That also ignores the piss poor state the moderation tooling is in on Lemmy. The same is true for many of the possible other "alternatives".
      All the new attention these platforms have gotten also means they are getting much more attention from developers. So things might change in the future for the better, in fact I am counting on it. But that isn't the current state of the fediverse. Currently most of the fediverse, specifically Lemmy is still very much in a late Alpha maybe early Beta state as far as software stability and feature completeness goes.

      And, yes, the situation on reddit is degrading and this latest round of things has accelerated something that has been going on for a while. But at the same time Reddit is the platform that has been around for a decade and where the currenty community is. Picking that up and moving elsewhere is difficult and sometimes next to impossible. I mean we haven't even talked about discoverability of communities for regular users.

      Lemmy (or any fediverse platform) isn't exactly straightforward to figure out and start participating in. If you can even find the community you are looking for. Reddit also hosts a lot of support communities, who benefit from reddit generally speaking having a low barrier of entry. Many of those wouldn't be able to be as accessible for the groups they are targeting on other platforms.

    • Then why are they even still there?

      Sunk cost fallacy or misplaced hope are other options outside of Napoleon complex.

    • It's easy to look at this from the lens of people just wanting power, but maybe it's something akin to the grief, honest grief, I felt about leaving Reddit because I had been there so long as just a user. I can't imagine how it would feel to give up control over something that I had created and curated for many years knowing that it was going to be destroyed. 

    • Yeah, I don't get it either. I rather easily went through and deleted all of my posts and comments. It was quite freeing, really.

      I also went through each sub that I moderated (solo, since I didn't want to cause conflict with any co-mods or others) and both privated them and set them to NSFW. I did set the co-run ones to NSFW though and they haven't been changed back yet, so I guess the others are okay with that.

      And I have yet to receive any messages from admins telling me to change them back. I go and check my account every week or so. Nothing's changed.

    • If you want to push back against the rising right-wing bigotry modding a decently sized subreddit might be one of the most effective places for regular people to do so. Arguably that power is not irrelevant in today's social media landscape.

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