I think that anyone who's been around reddit long enough knew this was coming. Reddit isn't a free and open platform, and never was. The admins allowed moderators free reign just so long as they didn't do anything that reddit didn't want.
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@manitcor Wtf!! What an asshole CEO
So far Spez's legacy includes, in no particular order:
- Changing other peoples' comments
- Starting a war with the 3rd party app devs who made reddit the easily accessible platform it is (browsing reddit on the toilet wasn't nearly as common before the first apps came out, and all of the first ones were 3rd party)
- Being a moderator on the jailbait subreddit, a community for sharing sexually suggestive pictures of underage teenage girls
- Forcing new moderation teams on communities whose moderation he didn't agree with
- Straight up lying about the 3rd party apps and their developers every step of the way
Way to go, Steve Huffman! You had a community of volunteers build your platform for you and now you're taking it all away from them. I'm sure this won't backfire.
I posted this previously elsewhere.
The statement from r/watchredditdie when they closed the sub really put things in perspective for me.
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have gone so far as to renege on their promise of listing Aaron Swartz among Reddit, Incβs founders. Such an egregious breach of contract - only performed once their agreed-upon co-founder no longer walked the earth - could only be carried out by immoral individuals acting in fundamental bad faith. In this way and so many others, Reddit is dead.
I posted this previously elsewhere.
The statement from r/watchredditdie when they closed the sub really put things in perspective for me.
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have gone so far as to renege on their promise of listing Aaron Swartz among Reddit, Incβs founders. Such an egregious breach of contract - only performed once their agreed-upon co-founder no longer walked the earth - could only be carried out by immoral individuals acting in fundamental bad faith. In this way and so many others, Reddit is dead.
Is your comment threatening him? Why are you blackmailing him, man? How is he going to work together with you now that you've so aggressively threatened him?
Why is your comment so badly coded? I can't help you optimize your comment, Google didn't help me write mine.
Wow I didn't know he ran r/jailbait. Gross.
He was forcefully added as a mod on the subreddit. Reddit used to have a system which allowed you to make someone mod without requiring them to accept.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/comments/1477psa/comment/jnuy0xf/
When people add you as a mod, you can still leave. He never did. That subreddit in particular was known to have the blessing of the reddit admins to operate and eventually made 'subreddit of the month'. Then a news org picked up that reddit was hosting this content and then they shut it down.
They were well aware of what was going on. Andrewsmith is right, there is some plausible deniability there, but with the everything else we know about Steve Huffman, I'm not so sure I can agree with his assessment that it was forced upon him.
While it's certainly better than actively moderating a community...
Is being the admin of a website that actively hosts jailbait and required a massive media outrage to finally remove it that much better? I get free speech and all, but I mean, the subreddit straight up catalogued which pictures were "fap material" and encouraged people (including parents) to take candid photos of the children around them.
A community like that wouldn't last a millisecond in a server I host.
lmao, good fuckin luck replacing dedicated volunteers with one or two shitty ones obsessed with power
lmfao no kidding. part of me is waiting to see the shitshow that happens to some subs without proper moderation. just the amount of bullshit thats gonna be submitted is gonna be intense. and the trolls, oh lord the trolls are gonna have a hayday with once properly moderated subs.
For example, /r/nba went dark for a Finals game - the final Finals game where a champion was crowned.
I'd love to see one or two lower-tier mods take over that sub. It'd become a complete pile of shit.
They can't just re-open subreddits and expect it to go over smoothly. These subs will collapse without moderators.
Honestly not too surprising. But good luck moderating the bigger subs without the old volunteers.
It's an absolute non-starter. The amount of random... I'm a medium fish there and there's SO MUCH you have to know to mod a sub, plus you're constantly in PR mode with the users to keep everyone happy and enjoying your work. Communication skills. Bot wrangling and sometimes creation. Automod. Css. Rule modifications. Enforcement and reviewing existing threads for rule violations. PLUS you have to know the existing culture or you're gonna make everyone mad.
I kinda want to see it. Reddit would explode.
Everybody knows that it was bound to happen. Reddit is hopeless and the blackout on its own won't do good in the long run.
That's why I'm trying to kick this out:
Deleted my account, removed Apollo, starting to feel at home on Lemmy. No way Iβm going back.
A lot of these people volunteered their spare time to manage communities for no pay. Wondering how far downhill a lot of these subs will go with Spez putting himself in charge of everything.
they won't. Spez is learning how much of reddit's success has nothing to do with reddit itself. hopefully we have all learned from the messy and long experiment with letting corps control our gardens.
Is it just me or is this going directly against what Reddit once aimed to be?
Corporations and Shareholders ruin everything
This post seems somewhat disingenuous. One of the mods Cedarwolf posted his side of what happened 2 hours prior to this post appearing, and if we were to believe his side of the story the top mod who hasn't been active for a year just decided to join the blackout against other mods wishes.
Yes, it's two conflicting stories but he claims to have evidence that he's been inactive. Basically, people should look into this more than assume truth in the headline.
This is why they need to link an alternative like Lemmy and encourage to share it around.
Reddit doesn't disallow mods from posting "Join us on Discord" and this will create a slow and steady move to a new platform.
Oof, not a good look. We'll have to watch more of the larger subs to see if this happens to them too.
I just returned for a couple of minutes and itβs a fucking shitshow. I donβt know if it has become worse or if it just feels like that because Lemmy is much more friendly, but Reddit seems to be much more toxic right now.
It is also so obvious that people are trying to use this as some kind of coup. Users interact with the thematic, get explained what the blackout is about, just to comment complete bs about it one comment later. They are acting dumb to gain momentum.
I really hope this will end up in a worldpolitics situation.
It's a 2 day blackout for god's sake, and it's nearly at the end of it! Was it really necessary to do that?
shows how desperate they really are, honestly feeling like we should push for more communities to commit to longer. even just to the end of the week may create capitulation. not that ill go back!
Here is some additional context from an actual Mod of AdviceAnimals:
[Deleted]
I've inquired if they're the one that phoned the Admins, but no reply yet. Having a top mod removed due to them unilaterally taking a sub private is not unprecedented, but it is an incredibly rare action.
EDIT: That user has confirmed they did not contact the Admins, and don't know who did, but that is still consistent with actions taken by Admins in the past to remove an absentee top moderator that made a unilateral move more active mods disagreed with.
Unfortunately, Reddit can just keep doing that as often as they want. Fortunately though, there are few people who will actually be able to do a good job moderating especially for FREE. They will burn through the good candidates and have to rely on unqualified people to do a mediocre job. This will ruin the content quality and eventually kill the sub. So long term we may still win, but short term we will likely see little change. The problem is always the level of involvement of the general public.
They should tread lightly. Reddit in no way has the ability to function (edit: at least on short notice) without volunteer mods. To some degree they can find scabs, but I honestly don't know how many and how good.
Well here is me abandoning reddit after 10 years. At the end they can do whatever they want with reddit and i can choose in which platform waste my time.
We can only hope reddit dissappoints their moderators so much they'd rather moderate lemmy communities :)
i love that they're making this extreme choice over fucking advice animals which haven't been relevant in literally 10+years
Fuck Reddit. But honestly Iβm less and less invested with each passing day. I re-opened Apollo today and itβs already starting to feel old, foreign. I guess that means Lemmy is home now.
Saw this coming the moment the blackouts were being planned