This article goes above and beyond to make it look like Reddit owes stuff to the moderators who are not their employees and there is no contractual relationship between the two parties.
The moderators aren't forced to be moderators, they can stop being mods or just move to a different online community.
What's happening here is that the moderators are seeking more control over the platform.
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.
This seems completely reasonable on Reddit's part. There has been an ongoing problem with two categories of moderators on Reddit that are way overdue for a shake-up,
* Absentee moderators, especially when they are at the top of the moderator hierarchy
* Power moderators who control moderator powers for dozens and sometimes hundreds of popular subreddits
The reddit mods are little tyrants in my experience. I hope the one's that think they own reddit get booted. Really, some of them are awful people. I wish I were trolling but I'm not. They can try to get their users to follow them somewhere else but it will fail because they are behaving unreasonably and breaking a site we all like, which has never been a big money maker. The mods belong in r/choosingbeggers for acting like it should be free
At this point Reddit mods look like unpaid employees to me. This was not the case say, 10 years ago, when Reddit admins enforced the sitewide rules and mods did their own thing. Now Reddit depends on mods to enforce the sitewide rules, instructs them in their work, removes them if their work product is not up to snuff, and I've even seen them demand minimum staffing levels be met.
On the flip side, moderators curate content for Reddit, and are expected to police their users, basically working for free to keep eyeballs on Reddit, for the benefit of the company. They've been begging for more tools since the creation of the site, and using every trick they have to create better content for their users.
Reddit removed some of their dark patterns, because those were the only tools they had, and now their content shows a net loss.
Reddit needs to stop making empty promises, show that they actually care about their moderators, and give them the tools they need. They're dragging their feet on helping mods curate this content and love to wag their fingers at the moderators who are working with rudimentary tools, but they sure do love to name drop the high profile posters they get.
Subreddit moderators are controlled by those who control the subreddit, not by Reddit itself (with, IIRC, a few exception where the moderators are Reddit employees).
If the mods walk Reddit will be just fine. If Reddit removes them, most of these mods won’t end up back in positions of power, some over hundreds of thousands of people. It’s the mods who need Reddit not vice-a-versa
I’m sorry you’re upset about this, but mods are just users who enjoy running communities (or worse, are paid by an org to curate some mentality.) They are not Reddit employees nor do they improve reddits bottom line. They are just users of a platform, but unlike general users they are the one demographic it’s easy to replace since users tend to think they can do better by default.
Moderating a subreddit is not labor, let alone forced labor. Reddit's admins are clearly in the wrong, but some of these mods have powertripped for so long that it has totally eroded their ability to perceive the world as an adult.
Sounds like a fair and reasonable plan to deal with these rogue mods. Subreddits are mostly maintained by their users, who contribute posts, comments and votes. In comparison to this, the mods do very little work. For them to unilaterally decide to destroy a set of subreddits is an attack on all the other users.
I've seen some people argue that the mods are legitimately on strike. I disagree - it would be different if all the users of a subreddit decided not to comment and post for a while. That would be equivalent to a strike. For the moderators to decide to block the subreddit instead is more like some middle manager padlocking the building gates shut so no-one else can get to work, just because he has a grievance with the company owner.
Can someone explain to me why losing mod powers is such a big deal? I'm assuming those who have been moderating these communities can put it on their resume or whatever and apply for paid community manager roles to do the same thing?
I'm not being sarcastic and I am fairly far detached from the Reddit drama. Just trying to understand the value that exists in moderating a Reddit community for free. It seems threatening to take it away is making them compromise on their values quite effectively.
I don't disagree with you, but this does seem like a pretty obvious move for Reddit.
I don't think Reddit cares about appeasing moderators. Though with or without this move it will be very interesting to see what will happen to Reddit if there is a mass exodus of moderators. Moderation is IMO the hardest problem in social media, all other platforms (Twitter, Facebook, etc) are objectively terrible at it. Reddit on the other hand with moderation at the micro level vs macro level seems to work. But its 100% on the backs of charitable time from unpaid users. If that falls apart, I can see it having a devastating effect on Reddit as a whole.
It seems the one of the fundamental problems leading to this situation is that reddit moderation is unpaid yet requires large amounts of time. So anyone who becomes a 'big' moderator has to monetize their efforts externally, leading to communities being suspicious of the motives of any big moderator.
I see a significant difference between AOL and Reddit. AOL selected the monitors and had the power to remove their privileges. That's what made them essentially employees. Reddit moderators are mostly self-regulated. Even in the large subs new moderators are chosen by other moderators and rarely is a moderator of a sub involuntarily removed, except if they have abandoned the sub or violated the terms of service. I can see how Reddit is not obligated to pay them because they volunteer by their own will and not at Reddit's discretion.
I used to moderate a lot of large subreddits back in the day, and don't understand why the mods don't just shut them down indefinitely, until reddit capitulates.
What, I won't be doing a bunch of free labor for a multimillion dollar company while being called a dictator all day? Yes please!
Reddit would probably have to step in and start removing moderators, digging their hole even deeper.
This doesn't sound like a problem to me? Moderators are random volunteers from the public, not Reddit employees. Feels like it should be trivial and easy to dismiss and replace them. Not like they can file a labor dispute with the company...
The moderators aren't forced to be moderators, they can stop being mods or just move to a different online community.
What's happening here is that the moderators are seeking more control over the platform.
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