Can you explain why you believe the mods are toxic? Reddit allowing autonomy created an entire army of unpaid mods in order to create communities that pay 100% of managements salaries despite current reddit management being basically bad at every aspect of their jobs. They absolutely can crush them if they want to but if they do they stand to crush those communities and end up owning the shell of what they wanted to control.
Ownership of reddit/r/$name isn't a valuable quantity if the people who contribute react badly to replacing the people running the joint being replaced by management stooges. For a case study consider freenode and look how that turned out.
I don't think this is true. Reddit is a corporation. If they decide they want to replace the mods in any sub with new mods they can do just that. There is no property ownership in the reddit domain. They just avoid doing so, but they can, just like how they shut down subs they don't want to see around. They do have control of the platform. The reddit mods are unpaid de-facto employees as they perform work on behalf of the corporation. I also suspect that some of them are actual employees of reddit.
Reddit does have access to capital, one of their owners is Tencent.
Which is why I don't think that moderator strike will have much effect. All these popular trash filled subreddits are moderated. Moderators just don't do that good of a job. Managing a community is hard and I sympathize with people doing it for free and failing. But as result, the number of subreddits that will actually be destroyed by their mods leaving is too small to affect company balance sheet. Vast majority of Reddit is already pretty low quality and its users are fine with it.
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
Reddit is built on free labor from mods. Without the mods they would have to pay people to moderate thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities. Most mods use old reddit on desktop or third party apps on mobile because their app and new site suck for modding. Alienating the mods means their subreddits go to shit, and reddit exists for content. Doesn't sounds like a 'win' to me.
Most of the reason Reddit works at all is because of the huge number of volunteers doing moderation because they're passionate about their sub. If Reddit had to pay for moderators they would be bankrupt in a very short time. And even if it did replace mods with its own people (whether paid or not) the quality of the sub will drop.
What are you talking about? The mods are the only thing letting Reddit get away without employing or contracting content teams of their own. Reddit would lose so much more money than it already does if it had no mods
The notion of Reddit mods being selfless unpaid volunteers is misleading. They wield considerable power, and it's a desired position. Also, mods have been known to engage in payola and other deception for personal gain/profit. And too many arbitrary rules, too many shadow bans/deletions, etc.
What happened with reddit is imo the mods affect the site's direction moreso than the administration or the devs. This is what happens when you put profit and cancerous growth above cultivating a community.
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.
Ego stroking of some mods is far from what is happening.. please get the full picture. Those unpaid mods that did work for Reddit for free get their tools taken away they need to do this unpaid work reasonably, while at the same time Reddit starts price gouging 3rd party apps to extract more value for their IPO - Reddit wouldn't be there where it is today if it wouldn't have all the free content of the users and free work of the mods.
Kind of ridiculous, but I mean how Reddit is acting, they can just remove those unpaid moderators, replace them with paid ones and restore everything back to normal: If that is your's and also Reddit's view, where is the problem then?
It's toxic because people wanting power insist their position is necessary, others adhere to it (mostly in the name of censoring dissent) and those granted the power, like with politics, are often the last people you want having it.
Based purely on anecdotal evidence, I would say that Reddit would be far better off if it relegated "moderators" to "janitors" to remove illegal content, and auditing who is removing what regularly, and leaving the "quality" and discoverability of the legal content to be derived from the upvote/downvote system they first relied on.
I mod a large-ish subreddit and I disagree with moderators "gaining full ownership of their communities". Not every mod was around since the very beginning or did most of these mods spend considerable effort marketing their communities like one would do in an actual company. Even for communities with a clear theme and set of behavioural rules (e.g. r/CMV), a lot of that is enforceable via AutoMod. Most of what moderators do are barely more than Internet janitors.
A volunteer position is voluntary. There is no contract or minimum time commitment (though some subs have minimum mod action requirements). If a moderator no longer likes to commit their time, they can either go on a hiatus or leave.
Monetizing individual Reddit communities or paying moderators will create a whole plethora of financial and ethical issues which Reddit HQ is obviously unwilling to address at the moment. I'm pretty sure they've thought about this and decided keeping the status quo is the best choice for the time being.
Reddit’s problem, assuming they actually want the site to continue to be a functional forum (and I think this is a big assumption, I think they view it as a huge LLM training set to sell now) is that they’ve depended on volunteer moderation. If the free moderators leave, they’ll either need to pay moderators (very expensive, would likely put them further in the red) or they watch the content go down the toilet, which is also bad for their IPO dreams. Having taken a blowtorch to moderator/power users’ trust, I think they’re in an inevitable death spiral at this point, it’s just a question of how fast.
The bulk of Reddit mods have so much of their identity riding on their moderation power that there is basically nothing Reddit could say or do to lose their free labor. Yes, there is a long tail of selfless reddit mods just doing their janitorial duties in some smaller subreddits, but most reddit traffic is directed to subreddits moderated by stereotypical mods whose physical stature resembles the shape of their place in the bell curve of traffic. They will never surrender that power because it's all they have going for them.
I think the median mod deserves almost zero credit for "creating" the communities that they oversee. The welfare of the mods and the communities are usually not tightly intertwined, and scenarios where the mods are committed to destroying these communities should serve as a counterexample to this idea.
>Ownership of reddit/r/$name isn't a valuable quantity if the people who contribute react badly to replacing the people running the joint being replaced by management stooges.
The idea that Redditors had some sort of prior affection for moderators is laughable. At best this is just tribalism where a vocal minority of Redditors is so upset at spez that they're opportunistically creating a narrative of heroic moderators being oppressed by evil admins that's reminiscent of an inverted Ayn Rand story.
Ownership of reddit/r/$name isn't a valuable quantity if the people who contribute react badly to replacing the people running the joint being replaced by management stooges. For a case study consider freenode and look how that turned out.
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