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trashhalo @beehaw.org

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.

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  • 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.

        • Absolutely. When I was on Reddit, all the subreddits I joined were very niche: cities, fandoms, parody subs, and the like. The main reason I found them was because I could think of something and go "it's Reddit, there's a subreddit for anything".

          That's pretty powerful when you're trying to build a community, since you can skip the "we exist" and "look here to find us" parts of the pitch and spend time and effort on the community itself instead.

          Lemmy/KBin just doesn't have that appeal yet. Pretty much all the subs here, while by no means bad, are very "general-interest", and the interface to find them is clunky, especially if they aren't on your home server.

          • you can skip the “we exist” and “look here to find us” parts of the pitch and spend time and effort on the community itself instead.

            Thank you for stating that so clearly!

        • This is also why many communities have failed to launch on migrating off of Twitter. They don't have a ready-made, prepped, and universally agreed upon landing site, and intersectionality of communities prevents them from actually finding one, so they're all individually faced with the prospect of leaving their online communities and starting over, or staying put.

          I sit on the periphery of most of my interest groups. I'm a loosely bound valence member, and many of my interests are also just well represented here in the Fediverse, so setting up shop here just wasn't an issue. But for people who are more tightly bound, it's going to feel like there are overwhelming barriers to leaving.

      • 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.

      • 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.

        This just feels like a cop out - welcome to the Internet, you need to search to find stuff? Maybe I'm terminally techie, or got online way "to early", but my god, how did people get on reddit to begin with? It wasn't a default homepage in a browser. How did they get an e-mail account? How did they find an ISP? Did they need counseling to pick a cell phone provider?

        This feels just like the "Linux isn't straightforward to ..." - Ok? Neither is Android or Windows or MacOS. You just went through that at some point in the past and don't remember the confusion.

        And it's not like Reddit started out with those communities. I mean, either you don't care, or you care and hoping reddit changes is basically like being in an abusive relationship. Maybe try asking a techie friend if you really can't handle a search engine and reading a small amount.

        I mean, we're not talking about setting up I2P to access an internal IRC network here, we're talking about picking a website and getting an account. This should not be hard. And if you're a mod fleeing reddit, maybe be the change you want to see and start a community on the fediverse.

        I might be not getting something here but it just sounds like "All these people are trapped in a bad situation and I don't believe they have any agency or ability to learn anything new to get out of it". These people have agency. Instead of telling everyone "oh Lemmy is too confusing" - point them to the hundreds of posts and websites now explaining how to do it.

        ok... breath... rant over.

        • Frankly, you are taking a too binary approach to the subject of your rant. There are tons of Lemmy instances, so figuring out the right one isn't as straightforward as stumbling upon a single central platform.

          This just feels like a cop out

          No, I am just outlining several factors that come into play that do weigh in for people. I am not just saying it is difficult to find Lemmy instances. I am saying it is difficult to move entire communities over. I am also saying several other things than just "moving difficult". To be honest, I highly suggest you go back and ready my comment again with the intent of seeing the nuance.

          • There are tons of Lemmy instances, so figuring out the right one isn’t as straightforward as stumbling upon a single central platform. I'm arguing that it's exactly as straightforward as picking between Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Pintrest, any website. How did these people who can't search find reddit? I get that it sucks leaving a company you have a relationship with. I just don't think it's hard, and I do think that the last 20ish years (at least) have shown that companies are "take it or leave it", and rarely if ever respond to requests no matter how you make them. So it's back to my initial point - you shouldn't want a "central platform" because eventually it becomes worse and worse. This holds true in theory (monopolies are bad) and practice over recent and longer history.

            I guess I also don't get the concern about picking "the right lemmy instance" - at worst, it's like picking an e-mail server, or grocery store. Try a random one, find out what doesn't work for you (if anything) and then use that knowledge to evaluate the next one. Repeat until happy. In reality - that's also what we're doing up a level in terms of platforms in general - I was happy on reddit till I wasn't. Presumably same for everyone. Many people might still be happy on reddit. I don't judge that - my beef is if you're extremely unhappy and yet basically want someone to change reddit for you vs moving on.

            I am NOT at all arguing that it's not difficult to move entire communities at all. I'm not sure if it's possible - you're going to basically fork no matter what. And that sucks, but it's also something the community risked (and always does risk) on a given platform if it becomes crap for some reason. A community is also never fixed and your reddit community is changing no matter what with the various things going on. I don't know how big a change it will be for any given community, but to the extent you're empowered by the central platform, you're losing some people (those like me) to alternative platforms. You can't stop that. Heck, even without reddit doing their best to burn their platform trust to the ground, there were always going to be people who move along, try and make a spinoff community either on reddit or elsewhere etc. You can't have a unified approach unless a large majority agrees to either live with reddit or to leave reddit to the same place. I don't think either is actually going to happen in the long run.

            And software wise, I think as you have pointed out it seems reddit wants to make things kind of worse and lemmy and the fediverse is trying to make things better. So over time, just like how lemmy is WAY more active now than it was a month ago, I think we'll see the software improve too. So maybe today it's really in reddits favor to stay there as a mod - though I know /r/photography didn't agree - but I feel like each day those lines are getting closer together where you'll cross and probably end up with 2 viable communities, and one isn't on reddit and everyone has to choose if they want to be on both, or one or the other. The main thing is lemmy and the fediverse are all in on API access and anyone writing tools, and reddit has closed that off basically entirely. So as I understand it, there's very little chance to get mod tools back on reddit, but there's every expectation that people are building mod tools for lemmy. That's not to say a closed system is inherently bad - but I've rarely found it to be the most inexpensive or option filled. I also heard a recent techdirt podcast on distributed moderation and reddit and that all their public competitors have (had? Twitter got rid of theirs but went private) professional trust and safety moderation teams, and there's a good chance that's going to be something wanted for an IPO by investors expecting legal or regulatory risk, and with that will be a push for a homogenized set of moderation rules across the entire site. I think that is very plausible, but also will further kill what made reddit special, and if we're talking about centralized platforms, facebook dwarfs reddits users, and for the "I don't care about how the site is run" large mass crowd that also does't care about NSFW niches and such, and DOES care mostly about ease of entry and finding communities - I could see facebook groups eating reddits lunch in the masses, while the others move on to places like lemmy.

            OT slightly: I've had multiple interactions on lemmy now where I seem to miss communicate something in a way I didn't on reddit or in e-mail listserves. And I'm wondering if it's cultural or ??? Specifically - I tend to quote and comment on the part of a comment I'm replying to that I have something to say about it. The parts I don't quote I (thought) I was implicitly not arguing with or for and at worst would be neutral to I support because I didn't "rebut" in my reply. But instead it often seems to be received like you did of me missing nuance. I tried in my initial reply to point out A) this is a rant (so don't take it that seriously) and I tried to imply B) I'm ranting about this one specific nitpick of the post. Is there some way to do that better? A "signature" I paste in (seems pretentious)? Some formatting change vs quote -> comment / rebut? Thanks.

            • Yeah, you raise some valid points about the future of reddit itself and communities being forced. A few things I specifically still want to reply to:

              I guess I also don’t get the concern about picking “the right lemmy instance” - at worst, it’s like picking an e-mail server, or grocery store. Try a random one, find out what doesn’t work for you (if anything) and then use that knowledge to evaluate the next one.

              Well yeah, but that is in hindsight easy to say. If all you have heard is "Lemmy" and you start looking things up it can become a bit overwhelming and dififcult to figure out. Also, ironically, because a lot of people are trying to put information out there. But, not everyone is good at actually creating easy to follow resources. Also, from a user perspective, you are entirely right. From a community perspective it is slightly more complex. You either need to find the money and people with technical know how to host your own instance or find a reliable instance that allows community creation.

              I tend to quote and comment on the part of a comment I’m replying to that I have something to say about it.

              On reddit I, personally, also wouldn't have assumed that to be the intent. Often because that is not what is happening. What I often do when I just want to reply to something specific is stating it. Something along the lines of "I generally agree with your post/comment, but this part specifically, I do have a slightly different view of" and then follow with the quote.

              this is a rant (so don’t take it that seriously)

              Heh, some people want their rants to be taken very seriously :) So again, just add it as context. Not just state that it is a rant, but that because of it is doesn't have to be taken seriously.

      • As a mod of a 200k subreddit, yeah it's not a power thing. I saw some fun thing people liked doing and made a place specifically for that kind of content. It was fun to see all the goffy stuff people made. Yeah every now and then someone was being a dick and needed to be removed but it was an overall fun place.

    • 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.

80 comments