Article by The Verge, providing details about various subreddits and their mods getting threatened because they are labeled as NSFW
The Verges coverage of this has actually been really good. Most other media outlets that have covered it at all have had 1 or 2 that demonstrated a superficial understanding of the conflict.
The verge has been regularly keeping up with what’s going on and seem to have a pretty good grasp on the issues.
Yet this little hidden gem rests at the bottom of the page after the article.
Volunteer-made project that fights bots on Reddit is shutting down
Grab some popcorn, the bots are coming.
This feels a bit like Reddit is that city planning guy who insists on opening the Ghost Containment Unit in Ghostbusters.
I don’t moderate anything.
Quotes taken from https://maya.land/monologues/2023/07/01/spez-feudalism-reddit.html
Imagine starting [a subreddit], hyping it up, patiently providing four-fifths of the content until people show up, moderating spam, moderating jerks, growing it gradually over time. Setting rules, establishing tone, running the weekly topical threads. Would you feel like that /r/whateverItWas existed because of Reddit the company? Would you feel like it fundamentally belonged to his Royal Highness Steve, and Steve was just delegating it to you to run? No! You started it! You shaped it! You collaborated with the people it attracted to make it what it is! Even those users – they could switch tomorrow to /r/whateverItWasTwo and you couldn’t do a thing about it – if they decided they didn’t like your vision for /r/whateverItWas, they would, so the fact that they’re still here is a kind of voting with your feet, it validates what you’re doing… To the extent that /r/whateverItWas exists as a thing within Reddit as a whole, to be run or misrun, managed or mismanaged? It feels like yours.
But at the same time, to an external observer – you can see how they would feel that this is pretty silly, right? The thing that’s “yours” is nothing but rows and columns in Reddit’s databases13, a series of flags giving you the power to moderate. The only thing you have is set in Reddit’s systems, a permission to edit stuff under a certain scope a bit differently than other users, wowee aren’t you important. It’s not you who has a license to the user posts, it’s not you who controls anything but a tiny little square of grass Reddit let you mow. You’re gonna protest over that? The world at large already doesn’t understand why you might volunteer for this work, why you might care enough to do it unpaid – you seem like a schmuck to them, a victim.
or a power tripper.
I’ll admit that some mods probably are on a power trip. A clear example of “probably not, they have an actual reason to want to stay in power” is r/askhistorians, where you probably don’t want random people replacing people with lots of historical knowledge on a subreddit specifically about history that only allows informative replies complete with a works cited. They care about the online space they’ve built, not that they have a ban hammer and can wield it with prejudice. I’d imagine a lot of other mods are pretty similar. Knowledge about their niche community, though probably not as much as the people on r/askhistorians, a certain subreddit culture that they don’t want to collapse and fall apart… they’d rather preserve the online space they and many other people enjoy. Even if it just looks like free labor and power tripping to outsiders whenever they don’t want to just up and abandon Reddit.
Yeah, as someone who modded for several years, there were two insults people loved to throw at us: Either we were power tripping or we were janitors who didn’t matter.
Either of these were used whenever we enforced the rules of our community and kicked out people who didn’t want to play nice with the rest of it. Of course, they will never have a positive opinion of people who enforce a community’s rules.And that’s the thing: The community. You do not spend several years modding a subreddit without getting to know the people and having some sort of relationship with them. The community is not an abstract, it’s people you get to know - often over several years - and that’s not something you want to leave behind.
this fucking sucks. i am very disappointed that the protests lost steam and everything is just back to normal, swept under the rug. they showed their hand, acted like fucking dictators, and everyone is just like “welp thats it!” and gives the fuck up. it’s just sad. it feels like 90% of the people who said they were in this were all just being performative.
so many of us dedicated a lot of time to the protests, left our communities, migrated, all for everyone to just go crawling back. i won’t go back. i am staying on kbin. but man, it fucking sucks to see reddit face 0 consequences because Spez was right, “this will blow over”
I think this has done damage to Reddit, but it’ll be death by a thousand cuts rather than a big instantaneous failure.
To be honest, I really don’t care what happens to Reddit at this point. I’d rather have Kbin be a smaller, more dedicated community than have it “kill Reddit”.
Reddit forgets just how well this move went for Tumblr.
