> “And I think on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get their first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”
The moderators are volunteers who work for free. The landed gentry were rent seekers who sought to live entirely from that income. If anyone is the landed gentry here, it's Hoffman.
Maybe he should allow Reddit users to vote on retaining him as CEO seeing how important democracy is to him.
No, it's a great idea. The only method of governance we have on the internet is dictatorship by fiat and any introduction of democratic methods, and tools to implement democratic methods, is good.
edit: he will find that he will have to pay people, though. If your mods are unpaid, you get mods that get off on power, or are paid from other sources.
Came to say just this. There's no profit sharing here. Mods don't get a cut of any proceeds off the traffic their communities generate. "Landed gentry" is exactly the wrong phrase.
The CEO is the landed gentry. The mods are the sharecroppers who have had enough.
As a moderator of a large subreddit (who also doesn't particularly care about Reddit), I'm shocked by how much distain spez (the CEO) has for the users of Reddit. Hey, I get it... running a social media company is really, really hard and monetizing it is even harder.
But I just genuinely can't understand how he thinks it makes sense to publicly disparage pretty much everyone who uses his site. There's no way he can make Reddit better if he's decided every single person who contributes content or curation to it is the enemy.
I guess he looked at Elon, and thought "man, I hate the people on my site as much as he does, and he's getting away with it." The difference is (and I'm no Elon fan), Elon has enough fans to power through. Nobody even knows who spez is.
I read a comment on one of the many other threads over the last week that paying moderators changes Reddit's liability under section 230 to be stricter. With volunteer moderators, the mods themselves are considered users instead of employees of the company and that apparently matters in a tangible sense.
Trying to find the comment since I'm not the expert who was mentioning, but it's likely not that easy/why they haven't just done this already, not counting the extra cost.
I'm not sure why them being employees would change their liability since section 230 was explicitly set up to protect moderation decisions by the host. As long as the content is created by third parties and they aren't the ones creating the content, they should be protected.
Still haven't found the comment! I'm no lawyer, but iirc it was that paid moderators making content approvals would end up turning them into publishers, where bc they're volunteers they're currently 3rd parties to Reddit, so if they approve illegal content now it can't hurt Reddit because of section 230.
Basically because mods don't just remove, but they approve content, paying them as 1st parties gets you into risky "publisher" territory.
edit: YOU FOUND IT. thank you!! your search-fu is a long lock of hair and mine is but an eyelash
That comment is misinformation. Moderating your website, whether through volunteers or paid moderators, does not change your liability under Section 230.
Pro tip: if you ever see a comment about Section 230 using the terms "publisher"/"platform", there's a 99.9% chance it is wrong and repeating one of several common misconceptions.
> There may be situations in which a court decides that those protections do not apply to a given piece of content
Which is all someone needs to lose, is section 230 protections over 1 piece of content, to lose a defamation lawsuit about that piece of content - which is what the comment I was linked was discussing. Seems pretty apt to me?
All of the other conversations about moderation in that article apply to removing content. Reddit moderators often review and approve flagged and auto-removed content, making it available on the site by their actions; I believe the commenter I paraphrased was saying that that action crosses the line into content creation, which even your article says introduces liability for bad content.
That's a fair point about the publisher/platform thing - the original comment was talking about literal newspaper publishers as an analogue of a content creator under section 230. I just plucked the word publisher and ran with it thinking it was a meaningful term wrt the law!
Good read.
edit: Either way though that commenter said the law hasn't been decided by court case around this question yet so it's all hypothetical!
Been on Reddit for about 14 years. Never knew of the guy until a couple months ago.
The amount of idiotic things I've heard quoted is ridiculous. Good for laughs though.
He founded Reddit, left relatively early, and came back in 2015.
Back in 2016, The_Donald members started posting "fuck u/spez" all over Reddit after he banned a Pizzagate subreddit. He went in and edited a bunch of their comments to say "fuck u/the_donald" instead, and there was a pretty big backlash.
Hey, I get it... it's gotta suck to have a bunch of people on your site hate you for the past 8 years. At some point it wears you down, and I bet that's what we're seeing now. I bet the things he's thought and said to his friends and coworkers for the past few years have been so normalized for him that he sees no problem saying them to the press.
But still, I don't think this is the way to respond.
Yup, agreed. On my sub, most people agree with the blackout. But there's a huge swell of people who are 100% on his side, and he's done a great job of pitting users against mods and framing mods as power-hungry jerks who are anti-democracy (in order to distract from the fact that he makes decisions with no accountability).
And he’s not totally wrong in my opinion. Some of the subreddits i often browse (regional ones) are often moderated in a questionable way. But the mods have been in there for literally more than a decade, which makes them similar to landed gentry.
On the other hand though, Elon has shown that it is possible to take unpopular decisions irrespective of the community opinions, if such decisions are believed to be necessary.
Twitter was near bankrupt if my understanding is correct, and that would have led to some restructuring and/or firing anyway (Elon or not).
> Huffman said those decisions should, in effect, go to a vote of members.
> “What I’m suggesting as a pathway out is actually more democracy,” he said. “We’ve got some old, legacy decisions on how communities are run that we need to kind of work our way out of.”
If we're voting on things, I vote to eliminate the ridiculous popup when you view a Reddit page on your mobile phone. Just give me m.reddit.com. Pretty sure that's not the kind of "democracy" that he's talking about though.
> (on profit sharing) “I would like subreddits to be able to be businesses if they choose,” he said, adding that’s “another conversation, but I think that’s the next frontier of Reddit.”
Just in case you needed another reason to stay away from Reddit.
I feel like Spez is a good case study of what not to do. The protest would be over if he had better messaging and tact. Every comment just adds fuel to the fire.
Not a fan of rage bait as much as the next person, but these are real quotes from Huffman from a major publication, hardly taken out of context. This is a major story. Why suppress it?
What they apparently did here was to selectively pick the most outrage inducing quote from the interview and put it into the headline, together with "slams". It's clickbait.
Somebody has got to help Steve get a grip. He's doing serious damage to Reddit and his own credibility. I can totally understand his disdain for people who he perceives are trying to ruin "his baby." But he's got to be smarter than this as a CEO. This is a matter of public opinion, and his defiance is just imprudent.
There is a large population of online users looking for an alternative. Where is the market competition? Where is the startup (or other company) leaping into the action to gain this ready-made audience?
I've been working on a platform with a bit of a different take on the online community space. It's sort of a Reddit/Discord/Patreon hybrid. We've built a place to monetarily incentivize ownership over the communities created on the platform. It feels like the people curating the communities should be rewarded for the work that they do.
There seems to be a pattern emerging here, and I've seen something similar in my contracting experience: Once the cheap money dries up, the social network figureheads show you who they really are. Believe them when they tell you.
And all of their wealth - including that of Gates, Bezos, Ellison, ad nauseum - is built on the knowledge, expertise, and labor of people they ruthlessly exploit and manipulate for their own gain.
And everyone still celebrates these assholes. Even as the scales fall from our eyes, they are still supported by their staff and employees, who continue to sell their lives to these narcissistic pieces of shit for a discount. The folks who do the real work should literally walk off the job and go start their own thing together, sharing the work and sharing the proceeds. Cut the rich assholes out of all of it.
they also very likely changed over the years. the constant tension and stress of having power and what to do with it.
we see how Musk and spez basically got into this egoistic (illusion of grandeur, psychotic) state over their own respective fiefdoms.
one more interesting data point about irrational decisions and power: Putin. he clawed his way into the dictatorship from a middling KGB officership. it seems his most competent skill is exactly that, scheming his way into bigger and bigger things/jobs, and of course he absolutely sucks as a leader.
all in all what I'm trying to say is that yes, even if some "basic competence" is needed initially, it's irrelevant in the long term
Let's be real with ourselves, this has nothing to do with 3rd party apps and everything to do with the plethora of awful automoderating tools that have ruined Reddit.
Reddit moderators are almost all a cancer to that site. They do it for free and are threatened that their power tripping fiefdom tools are going awy. Ironically reddit even said most of those tools would hit the free tier anyway.
If spez had balls, he would run a script that opens all of the hidden subs, disable the ability to hide/delete subs, and show these jannies erm mods the door.
The site has become an absolute cancer with discussion being heavily dictated. I welcome a mass exodus of those "mods".
When a site is run by assholes, the best move is to pack up your toys and play elsewhere.
Reddit continues to attract drama, censorship, moderation, and now usability problems that cannot be resolved when the leadership (with user-hostile corporate interests) is damaged beyond repair.
It's not difficult to make a site that can add posts and comments. It's difficult to moderate users and moderators in a fair and appropriate manner that respects the interests of the individual and the community: the emotional labor of meta-moderators and UX technical effort of developers is crucial to make a site as civilized as reasonable while allowing enough freedom of expression balanced by reducing and diffusing conflict.
Reddit moderators are entitled to nothing.
They aren't altruistically providing some service for the common benefit, they're just sort of occupying the free real estate. Reddit moderators could all walk away from Reddit and that'd be perfectly fine with me, even if it meant that Reddit stopped existing entirely.
Might not be be the best metaphor for him to be using. Historically, when the king gets in conflict with the landed gentry, well, very often the king suddenly finds himself a bit lacking in the head department.
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