Current Events > The Reddit mods keep getting funnier

(+) Yeah! (+)

I know I've posted about this a lot, but it seems like every time I check Reddit there's some new embarrassing post to react to. See here a reddit mod thinking he's in a position to address advertisers directly:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/2/9/AAFUDuAAEk1F.jpg

https://youtu.be/9aTCIWtwo1Q?t=36

I hope spez get fucked

Yeah, this ship is sinking pretty fast.

If I were them, I'd try to find another way to hit reddit where it hurts before replacement moderators were chosen. Maybe reach out to the advertisers while poisoning the potential replacement mod pool with likeminded people who will keep the strike going for a long time or something even if it was on and off.

Not sure how possible that would be though

itachi15243 posted...

Not sure how possible that would be though

Not very. This is really just a bunch of activist power trippers trying to increase the power they have over reddit. Bullet point two of the above post includes the demand for mods to be involved in "decision making processes" by reddit. Like they think their volunteer hall monitoring makes them part of the board of directors or something lol

Reddit's going to twitter itself, isn't it?

Normally I'd find this kind of stuff cringe but Reddit's corporate greed is pretty disgusting.

Let's pit the C-party execs vs the most willing mods and have a PPV battle royale event. But not boxing since they'd all be bums. Let's do Double Dare events. Is Mark Summers still alive?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/3/7/AAe_4aAAEk1N.jpg

Gobstoppers12 posted...

Not very. This is really just a bunch of activist power trippers trying to increase the power they have over reddit. Bullet point two of the above post includes the demand for mods to be involved in "decision making processes" by reddit. Like they think their volunteer hall monitoring makes them part of the board of directors or something lol

Yeah it kinda sucks too considering that if they had gotten together with their communities and really organized something they probably could have collectively at least held back some of the api changes or something.

The planning and execution here is really lackluster.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/4/7/AAFUDuAAEk4f.png

The Meme in question:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/4/8/AAFUDuAAEk4g.jpg

once the advertisers leave reddit they will flock to gamefaqs and it will rise from the ashes surely

It's hard to take a side in this battle. I never like supporting corporate greed but at the same time, it's pretty cringe that these power tripping volunteer mods honestly think they wield any kind of actual power over the company.

The moderators are just users. If you don't acknowledge the userbase as having any power you're on the side of corporate greed whether you know it or not.

PesticideDream posted...

It's hard to take a side in this battle. I never like supporting corporate greed but at the same time, it's pretty cringe that these power tripping volunteer mods honestly think they wield any kind of actual power over the company.

The company exists precisely because of these unpaid volunteers from among the users though. Most people don't want to dick around in an unmoderated cesspool without any real communities being formed. Moderators are valuable even if their individual decisions might piss people off.

Quezovercoatl posted...

The moderators are just users. If you don't acknowledge the userbase as having any power you're on the side of corporate greed whether you know it or not.

The userbase as a whole has power. A tiny percentage of the userbase with a small escalation of site access privileges does not have any more power than any other small percentage of the userbase in the long run. They're borrowing power--renting it, really. The cost of their power is to follow the moderator agreement (which they're breaking by arbitrarily closing/locking subreddits)

You say "siding with corporate greed," I say "most people don't use third party apps nor care about this protest and the certified Reddit mods are whining about the lack of support"

What the fuck are you talking about

Gobstoppers12 posted...

You say "siding with corporate greed," I say "most people don't use third party apps nor care about this protest and the certified Reddit mods are whining about the lack of support"

Do most people not care or do you not care? It seems to me that for something this big to have happened there are more people who care than just a handful.

CoyoteTheGreat posted...

Moderators are valuable even if their individual decisions might piss people off.

The problem with moderators is that they seemed to think they are irreplaceable. Being told that they could in fact easily be replaced seems to have shattered their entire worldview.

Quezovercoatl posted...

Do most people not care or do you not care?

Most people do not care.

Quezovercoatl posted...

It seems to me that for something this big to have happened there are more people who care than just a handful.

This whole thing was almost entirely coordinated by a handful (maybe a couple thousand) of mods collaborating together to shut down their biggest subreddits. They claim to have 'taken polls of their users' but many did not. As far as I can tell, the poll results also were not made public (if so, I've never seen the results posted)

Basically this is an attempted Mod uprising more than an actual Reddit user protest. As of today the front page seems to be mostly back to normal and the upvote numbers are what they normally would be (in my experience anyway). So...I don't think this massive site-wide protest is as big as the mods thought it would be.

Gobstoppers12 posted...

As far as I can tell, the poll results also were not made public (if so, I've never seen the results posted)

If you've never seen any poll results then how can you say with confidence it was something only a handful of people wanted?

If Reddit is back to normal all it proves is that scabs are effective at breaking digital picket lines.

Thompson posted...

Reddit's going to twitter itself, isn't it?

Based on his comments, the head guy at Reddit seems enamored of the way Musk runs Twitter. We'll see what happens.

Gobstoppers12 posted...

Most people do not care.

This whole thing was almost entirely coordinated by a handful (maybe a couple thousand) of mods collaborating together to shut down their biggest subreddits. They claim to have 'taken polls of their users' but many did not. As far as I can tell, the poll results also were not made public (if so, I've never seen the results posted)

Basically this is an attempted Mod uprising more than an actual Reddit user protest. As of today the front page seems to be mostly back to normal and the upvote numbers are what they normally would be (in my experience anyway). So...I don't think this massive site-wide protest is as big as the mods thought it would be.

Proof? Because you and a few others keep saying this back fail to back your position yourselves. Meanwhile we have stuff like the community of r/pics overwhelming voting to limit itself to pictures of John Oliver in a form of protest.

Quezovercoatl posted...

If you've never seen any poll results then how can you say with confidence it was something only a handful of people wanted?

Because I'm looking at the front page of Reddit and it's pretty much just Reddit again. If it were a widespread boycott it would be more noteworthy I think. Nobody's even talking about it, as far as I can tell.

Also, it's on the mods to prove people wanted it, not on me to prove that they don't. The fact they're using Reddit at all is proof people want it to be available.

Not a single subreddit I go to that did the blackout did a poll. Just one day "hey we closing". Absolute scum. If they at least did a poll and showed the results and the blackout won, fine. But the fact that they sat in their own little hidden discord and made the decision is why it makes me mad when people say "the reddit mods are just regular users like us!", no, they have made it very clear they think they are in charge and don't give a shit about any else's input. Hope every single one of those dogs gets ripped away from their power trip simulators.

I just want to keep RIF on my phone

Fenrir_Howls posted...

Proof? Because you and a few others keep saying this back fail to back your position yourselves. Meanwhile we have stuff like the community of r/pics overwhelming voting to limit itself to pictures of John Oliver in a form of protest.

They keep saying it because it is what the reddit CEO said. He is definitely a "that guy".

Fenrir_Howls posted...

Meanwhile we have stuff like the community of r/pics overwhelming voting to limit itself to pictures of John Oliver in a form of protest.

66,000 people voted for it.

There are 30,000,000 people subscribed to r/pics.

That's about 0.2% of the subscribers.

Most people who see things from r/pics don't actually navigate to the subreddit itself, they just see the popular things hit the front page. Most users of Reddit did not see the polls. I sure didn't.

To think, none of this would've happened if the top brass of Reddit hadn't decided that charging third-party apps astronomical fees to use the site is a better alternative to improving the usability of their own app.

Moderators? What moderators?

The lazy scum has been using bots to do their jobs. I got banned from some funny animal subreddit because of false positive on my post history. Obviously got it overturned after I messaged the mods but after like the 2nd sub doing it, i just couldn't be bothered.

Just wondering when the politics board on GameFAQs got removed did the mods of this site have any say in preventing it?

If they had none I am surprised Reddit mods think they can have a say in what the admins of a site do.

BlueTigerLion posted...

I am surprised Reddit mods think they can have a say in what the admins of a site do

Me too. They got a little too big for their britches in this case.

The meltdowns in the coordination/save3rdpartyapps subreddits are pretty funny to see. On one level I feel bad for them because they overestimated their own influence, but...on the other level, I do not feel bad for them at all because they brought it on themselves.

Wish our mods were more proactive like these guys

Jennywentnorth8 posted...

Not a single subreddit I go to that did the blackout did a poll. Just one day "hey we closing". Absolute scum. If they at least did a poll and showed the results and the blackout won, fine. But the fact that they sat in their own little hidden discord and made the decision is why it makes me mad when people say "the reddit mods are just regular users like us!", no, they have made it very clear they think they are in charge and don't give a shit about any else's input. Hope every single one of those dogs gets ripped away from their power trip simulators.

Are you sure? One the recurring themes on subs I visit is that there was a poll, but because the official app is absolute dogshit and more interested in pushing content than just showing the sub it never got seen except by third party app users.

Thompson posted...

To think, none of this would've happened if the top brass of Reddit hadn't decided that charging third-party apps astronomical fees to use the site is a better alternative to improving the usability of their own app.

Outside of it not having a text to speech feature (I think that was a big one), what exactly is wrong with the app? I've been using it for a few years and have no idea what people mean when they say the official site/app is unusable.

loafy013 posted...

Outside of it not having a text to speech feature (I think that was a big one), what exactly is wrong with the app? I've been using it for a few years and have no idea what people mean when they say the official site/app is unusable.

I don't even use the app, I straight go to reddit through my phone's internet browser.

Almost all of the subs I'm a member of have gone back online.

This may have something to do with it
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/0/0/AAb-t6AAEk5U.jpg

You know it's not Reddit that creates subreddits, right? Imagine if you made a YouTube channel, put thousands of hours into it, and built up a large viewer base. Google decides to do something greedy that limits your ability to control how viewers post on your channel and how they view it. So, since it impacts your channel directly, your decide to close your channel until Google changes their mind. Google doesn't like this and says, "Open your channel back up or we're going to take it away and let someone else use it."

It's not a perfect analogy, but it's similar. And here's Gobs just crying because he can't view funny animal pictures, refusing to even acknowledge what the protest is about (again, but at least this time it's not about Black people's right to live).

It's funny how anybody can take this protest seriously, like the general community doesn't support it in any way, the mods simply using their ability to control the flow of information to make it look like they have support, this fact is clearly demonstrated by simply sorting by new on any of the returned subs especially in the comment sections of posts about the topic.

Jonny2284 posted...

Are you sure? One the recurring themes on subs I visit is that there was a poll, but because the official app is absolute dogshit and more interested in pushing content than just showing the sub it never got seen except by third party app users.

So there were polls, but the majority didnt see them because they were already using the official app? And you think that paints a picture of support for people who want third party apps?

All youve done is demonstrate that most people are just using the official app, and so likely dont care about the changes.

ChocoboMogALT posted...

You know it's not Reddit that creates subreddits, right?

True, but when a subreddit is created and it becomes popular, there is an expectation that the subreddit continues to deal with the content that made it popular. As the Reddit statements have said, the primary goal of Reddit is to enable communities of people to gather and discuss certain topics.

If you abruptly change the focus of the subreddit, that's in violation of that goal. You may "own" the subreddit, but only as long as you maintain its purpose. You can't make a subreddit about Game of Thrones until it gets 5 million users and then permanently change it to be about NASCAR racing instead, for example.

Reddit is not like YouTube. Moderators manage a space, while users create the content for it. At the end of the day, the users are the primary focus. Moderators don't have the right to disrupt the user experience for their own agenda. Though sometimes that happens anyway, because reddit mods love to power trip.

ChocoboMogALT posted...

refusing to even acknowledge what the protest is about

I know what it's about, but it doesn't affect me or the majority of other users of the site, so it's not really relevant to me (or those other users.)

Kombucha posted...

once the advertisers leave reddit they will flock to gamefaqs and it will rise from the ashes surely

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/1/8/AAfdPZAAEk5m.jpg

you can tell reddit is wrong here because all of the worst users on this board are bitching about reddit mods constantly

you can tell reddit mods are wrong here because all of the worst users on this board are b****ing about reddit admins constantly.

Gobstoppers12 posted...

If you abruptly change the focus of the subreddit, that's in violation of that goal. You may "own" the subreddit, but only as long as you maintain its purpose. You can't make a subreddit about Game of Thrones until it gets 5 million users and then permanently change it to be about NASCAR racing instead, for example.

Reddit is not like YouTube. Moderators manage a space, while users create the content for it. At the end of the day, the users are the primary focus. Moderators don't have the right to disrupt the user experience for their own agenda. Though sometimes that happens anyway, because reddit mods love to power trip.

Why can't they change it if they made it? People can dislike that and go elsewhere if they want. You changed the focus of your private board and aren't just bending over to the people there who were mad.

Good lord, I could smell the boot polish all the way from the topic list

Honestly ultimately I'm arguing the wrong thing anyway. We clearly aren't going to agree on how many people care, and while I would say hundreds of subreddits closing means thousands of people care, the issue about a group of people you aren't in denying other people in a different group which could very well be larger access to something they want is literally the point of a strike, the point of protest in general.

It makes a statement and draws attention to their cause and forces people to consider their demands.

When the screen actors guild or writers guild strike, do you say "more people than you guys in our group of unrelated people want to watch tv, so get back to work already" Would you just tell black people in the civil rights movement to give uo their bus seats or leave the restaurant?

Quezovercoatl posted...

It makes a statement and draws attention to their cause and forces people to consider their demands.

True, and then it makes the general population angry and bolsters tremendous support for the owners of the website instead of the cause.

It "brought attention" to the cause, but not all attention is favorable attention. As more and more people learn of the moderators' actions, a lot of those people are deciding that it's disruptive and annoying rather than productive.

It's hard to talk somebody into supporting your niche cause, but it's very easy to talk them out of it.

UnholyMudcrab posted...

Good lord, I could smell the boot polish all the way from the topic list

Its an online forum. No one is fighting for civil rights