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‘Unlike some of the 3P [third-party] apps, we are not profitable,’ Steve Huffman says in defending the move to charge for high-volume API access.
It makes me sad that a site as big as Reddit is letting down so much of it’s userbase for a quick buck. At least it’s making people look for decentralized sites like this more, I suppose
From my perspective as a user that has been on reddit for a while, its been on a downhill slide for a long time now. The moderation mechanisms there are really becoming the downfall. Its like police or politicians, the position attracts the very qualities that would make you unsuitable for such authority.
I am also unsure what most of the 2000+ employees do, because by all accounts they are generally unresponsive to both users and mods alike when they reach out. This is as true now with the API stuff and small devs not getting traction to work with them, as it has been in the past and was a major reason there was backlash when Victoria was let go.
This really is a bigger and more complicated problem than I think most people realize. I helped moderate some larger subreddits for a while, but I burned out hard and will definitely never be doing it again.
You’ve got the people who really did care, at some point, but all of their empathy for the people they’re supposed to be serving got ground down by the insults and derision that moderators always have to put up with, until issuing bans and removing posts and comments becomes rote and they don’t see the humanity or the nuance anymore.
You’ve got people who seemed reasonable when they applied to become a moderator, but as more trust and autonomy is afforded to them they change and become outright abusive. Presumably because it’s the only thing in their life that makes them feel powerful. And if they’ve been around for long enough and moderated actively enough, then removing them can be a whole stressful ordeal that blows a big hole in a team’s ability to keep up with the mod queue.
And you’ve got people who do care, and who are able to take abuse from the community without it affecting their approach to moderation. But for these people, all the drama that arises in trying to work on a team with the former two kinds of moderators becomes increasingly demotivating, until they burn out and step away.
And god forbid you try to help moderate a subreddit that actually matters. On top of everything else, you will have bad actors actively trying to infiltrate the moderation team, to bring in new moderators with a certain agenda and to push out old ones. Or you’ll have those who are determined to find a way to personally profit from having a position of power in a large online community, even at the cost of the community itself. I still don’t know how one keeps these people out, once they’ve taken an interest.
I think there are some things that can help. I’ve seen that, on reddit, having a top moderator who is disengaged from normal moderation but who will keep tabs and step in like a benevolent dictator to arbitrate internal disputes and ensure that there are decisive resolutions can keep larger moderation teams more stable for longer. This way the top moderator isn’t so involved and won’t burn out, and everyone below them on the moderator list knows that there is someone they are accountable to. (Of course, this all hinges on the top moderator being suited to this kind of role.)
But even so, once a community grows past a certain point, I think it’s just not viable to run it off the backs of volunteers anymore.
I wonder how that’ll play out in this federated model. Many of these problems sound like general problems with being a mod (honestly it sounds horrible) rather than uniquely Reddit.
The federated approach will shrink communities for a time but I worry that there’ll be a sharp recentralization as instances stop federating with anything below some size to avoid a wave of spam/junk (similar to the problems small mail servers see).
But I’m new to this model so maybe there’s a reason it won’t play out that way
All your points are very true, unfortunately. It just saddens me seeing companies hurt the very community that even allowed them to rise to popularity
Allowed them to rise is an understatement. The content and the value comes from users alone. Reddit itself is his a shell without them. Even the moderation happens through the users. I don’t know what will happen to Reddit, but I do hope it will be painful for spez.
I care less for what happens to the website and more what happens to the users. Having a website where you build and found such large communities fuck you over like this must be heartbreaking
It’s my experience that it’s gotten better. T_D, way of the bern, brigading etc we’re all horrible in 2015ish. There were some truly awful subs like jailbait. You’d routinely see NSFW videos on the front page that were not properly tagged, like people violently dying.
Imo Reddit is much more pleasant to use. I think a lot of their decisions have worked pretty well
At some point reddit stopped deleting comments and instead edited them [Removed by reddit] that’s when it really started slipping.
Given that they had opportunities to actually monetize these apps (force displaying ads, charging a reasonable price for API access), it seems obvious that it’s a move toward wiping out the third-party ecosystem entirely instead of just trying to get compensated for it.
The backtracking to allow mod tools to continue operating (those that still added irreplaceable value to the platform) while refusing to negotiate with other apps just reinforces that.
It’s sad to see this happen but I’m (unfortunately) not surprised. Whenever a site/software/etc becomes the main/only thing most people use it starts taking advantage of that. I just hope it happens less in the future with the rise of decentralized nd federated social media