That’s a recent quote from Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler. Here’s more of it: This week, Reddit has been telling protesting moderators that if they keep their communities private, the company will take action against them. Any actions could happen as soon as this afternoon.
I don’t want to be incendiary, but aren’t they just getting new mods? Are the new people going to show up and wreck the place for fun?
Ever worked somewhere where management got cleaned out and replaced with new people who had no existing connection to the place?
Bad mods have always been an issue, but for most places there would at least be some sort of chain of succession where the person who started the community brought on somebody they thought was good, and so on. Most places in having multiple mods would have crossover between new and old mods.
Nuking all that and appointing some rando has a much higher chance that the new mod is going to be bad. Look at the snackexchance drama where some rando totally “randomly” got appointed head mod and his first action was talking about getting government ID verification going for exchanges without asking the community anything.
Reddit will likely be able to subdue most subreddits eventually, but the time and effort spent doing so will be wasteful and publicly ugly as they parade in various mods, and have to step in to crack down on userbases bent on being disruptive.
This is a common argument that I usually see people making, there are a few big problems though with the idea of just getting new moderators. The first problem is that moderation is difficult. It’s really easy to look at online posts talking shit about moderators and think that you could do a better job than them but you couldn’t and neither could most people, it is a very tedious and difficult process, while there may be many people who are willing to do it there are not as many people who are cut out to do it.
The second problem is that the API changes that Reddit has imposed will make content moderation ever more difficult due to the loss of automated tools that help. People are going to bring up reddit’s promise to bring moderating tools to the mobile app or to improve moderation tools in general, this is most certainly an empty promise and even if fulfilled they will do the absolute bare minimum. This is a problem because it means that even for seasoned moderators content moderation is going to become increasingly difficult. Now imagine for somebody who isn’t a seasoned veteran moderator, who was freshly appointed by Reddit’s administration to fill the roles of mods who quit. I imagine they’re probably not going to be able to do this job effectively.
Even If you hired a paid moderator team they would still be nowhere near as effective as the volunteers who poured their heart and soul into it, especially considering that those moderators will be working regular jobs. They’re not going to be able to moderate to the lengths that an unpaid volunteer could. This is also ignoring the fact that Reddit very much cannot afford to appoint paid administrators to moderate all of the largest subs on Reddit, considering that making a lot of money is their goal that just isn’t sustainable.
So yeah while they could get new moderators it would not be a very easy task for them, and would definitely come with severe drawbacks. Obviously Steve Huffman doesn’t really care, he’ll probably try it anyway and who knows maybe it’ll seem to work out short term, the new moderators won’t really be put to the test until they have to deal with a large scale bot attack, either coordinated or uncoordinated. A good thing to keep in mind is that the scammers are watching this scenario, they’ve already started using it to their advantage by messaging moderators pretending to be administrators as a phishing attack. An experienced mod might be able to Ward this off or not be affected, but in unexperienced mod may fall for this kind of attack without knowing better.
r/ZeroWaste has had to close comments due to spam comment-bots promoting a retail website that the built in tools cannot deal with. Since they can no longer use the third party tools they rely on to handle issues like that they’re just not able to operate the sub anymore and are recommending their users visit [email protected] instead.
That same ZeroWaste post claimed that as of 17 hours ago SpambotSwatter had a 200k+ backlog in theeir span detection system. The sharks were already circling the water waiting for the defences to drop. I suspect there will be a big increase in spam through this weekend. The question is what that will lead to? Will Reddit magically produce a way to fill in for the lost functionality and solve the issue? Will the flood of disruptive comments just be accepted as the new normal? Will it cause enough disruption to otherwise uninterested users to drive an unignorable level of people kicking up a fuss or just dropping their usage?
I suspect it’ll be the worst possible outcome but I guess we just have to wait and see what happens.
Edit: by worst possible outcome I mean worst possible outcome for Reddit’s username not for Reddit as a business sadly.
And you just convinced me to delay my reddit account deletion by 1 week.
I must watch this with my own eyes, no matter what.
If I can convince you to go a step further… Deleting your account (at least in the near-term) may not be the best course of action. Simply deleting your account does not delete the content you created on Reddit nor (afaik) all the data they hold on you and allows them to continue to profit from those things. Once you’ve deleted your account you are no longer able to directly delete the content made by that account. Deleting all your content first is a good start however that’s a long-term process as any comments or posts you’ve made to subs that are currently privated are harder to remove and when and if those subs become public again your content comes back with it. So from that perspective it’s probably worth keeping your account and checking it is empty from time to time. There’s also been some accusations of Reddit undeleting comments but it’s not clear if that’s what’s really happening. If it is a concern though, editing your comments first should mean only the edited versions could come back. Most people edit to a blank comment but you could edit to say something about why you are removing your content from Reddit. Leaving those comments in place so you’ve removed your content but are showing why (and where else similar content can be found…) is probably the best option. As for the data they hold on you. I’m not sure exactly how much they would keep if you just deleted your account but there’s a good chance there is some sort of data privacy law you could use to request they tell you and or delete all of it. Certainly within the EU and UK you have some sort of right to be forgotten.
I’m wondering if Spez is bringing in moderators from an Indian cube farm. Cheap labor, but god, moderation quality will be in the toilet.
I mean I’m pretty sure that’s where many of the AEO people are from also Indonesia. I know that they seem to have a severe failure to understand English and also do a horrible job with processing invalidate reports or rejecting valid reports. I could only imagine the hell that would ensue if people like this were moderators.
They won’t deliberately wreck the place, but they won’t understand what made reddit a great site.
Unless they pay for new mods, their only option is to take volunteers.
The people who would volunteer to be the new mods after this shitshow are not the kinds of people that can run good communities. It’s going to be power tripping psychos and uncommitted absentees and, yes, saboteurs that want to wreck the place for fun. They’ll get a few good mods, but they’ll be outnumbered.
Its not just replacing mods though. Take the issue that happened with that snack sharing subreddit. The current mods held it for 10+ years. They built several tools that automated verification and rating people who shared with each other and it prevents a LOT of drama and scams. Then reddit replaced them because of the protest. But what about the automated tools that they personally made for “their” sub. The owner of those tools took them down. The new mod put them back up. They will die on the 30th anyways because they wont make the API requirements and if they are forced to stay up byt he new mods then the person who will have to pay reddit for the API usage is no longer the mod there.
This is not a unique situation either. Tons of people made auto moderation bots and tool over the past 16+ years. Most of those tools break today and if the mods are replaced then those tools are stolen from the owners. If the owners remove the tools reddit sees that as protesting and removes the mods.
It’s going to be a train wreck and a legal nightmare.
Even in a perfect world you are replacing mods that know the communities and have created them and worked on them for years with a new set of mods with no attachment or experience running those communities.