Is how easily mods have caved in once the admins threatened to remove them. I had thought we’d see quite a few cases where Reddit would have to step in an replace entire mod teams (effectively killing the community). But it seems like that hasn’t happened at all - the closest we’ve got is mods being reordered.

I guess I didn’t appreciate how much moderating means to some people, especially people who are marginalised or otherwise have shitty lives… (which makes Reddit’s behaviour even more abhorrent! Exploiting the most vulnerable in society to provide free labour they are making huge profits off).

That said, it seems like Reddit has crossed the Rubicon now. They have now forced mods to run their subreddits in a certain way. Mods now know they are operating in some tight boundaries, and the admins can - on a whim - change the rules and force them to comply. i.e. any illusion of the power they had is now massively reduced. I’m sure a lot of them will be in denial, but this more than likely won’t be the last time we see this happen.

  • clutchmatic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    I guess I didn’t appreciate how much moderating means to some people people, especially people who are marginalised or otherwise have shitty lives…

    You hit the nail in the head. I suspect that the mod protest is not about the stupid surcharges on third party API users, but a combination of:

    • Native Reddit app not offering any type of meaningful tooling so that mods can be effective at moderating content (this is the main one - if reddit always had good tooling for mods, I bet the mod community wouldn’t care less for third party viewers)
    • Massive greed on Reddits part, by not offering compromise solutions (like offering free API usage to subscribes who pay some $2 per month and shifting the cost to users)
    • Reddit technical inability to push ads via API (just force adds through API and make the terms and conditions such that filtering ads become a.violation of API)
    • Zaphodquixote@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      12·
      1 year ago

      My reason for taking part is the fact that the cheap fuck, spez, wants to sell our content, place ads on seeing the content, mine tracking data to sell more ads, but only let us do it on the app that’s the most invasive, least developed, buggiest possible heap of shit that’s available for reddit.

      He does all of that while crowing about reddit’s corpus of data, wanting to lock nsfw content to the official dumpster fire of an app so he can be a cyberpimp, and then repeatedly refusing to admit that he does nothing useful for the company that the mods and users actually keep going.

      Fuck spez.

      The api pricing is just the head of the zit. He’s the pus inside.

      • swan_pr@kbin.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        Agreed. Unfortunately on my local sub (just a bit over 250k users) the mods are the ones trying to push for continued protest through malicious compliance. Most users are completely clueless and find the protest cringe and useless. I’ve gone back twice since the blackout, only to voice my opinions and it was not well received. A lot of people just don’t see a problem with having the platform getting revenue off their own content. I don’t think I’ll ever go back to Reddit and will most likely delete my account after 12 years.