That’s a recent quote from Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler. Here’s more of it: This week, Reddit has been telling protesting moderators that if they keep their communities private, the company will take action against them. Any actions could happen as soon as this afternoon.
After being a Lemmy lurker for a few weeks, I submitted a request for an account on an instance that manually approves accounts earlier this week. Just checked and confirmed that my account was approved. This was based on calls for engagement to help grow the community. While I’ve been here for a bit, here’s my first participation. Ayo!
I’ll never understand the people who are hell bent on trying to get reddit back. No matter what they won’t have a say in anything that happens, own anything, or even have a voice. I’m glad people are finally moving to an open source alternative.
I love how their CEO believes - is absolutely convinced - that launching a crusade against his product’s users and mods to be a winning strategy.
Kinda sad but platforms come and go.
The only thing that makes me sad is we cannot take the years of knowledge stored in reddit with us. Some of those co tributors who posted valuable contributions are not active anymor or some has quietly passed away irl.
If reddit decides to wall their site, unviewable to non paid subscribers, then it will be like an end of a small scale civilization where poeple go back to basic living,
I hope in time we can rebuild the same kind of knowledge here.
Good news. According to lemmy explorer, there are “Ask Historians” communities on 3 different Instances. (the one on “lemmygrad.ml” has the most subscribers right now but it’s only 403.)
Maybe pass on the lemmygrad.ml anything…
Man i really hope Reddit dies and people move onto decentralized networks, in time I’m sure we can figure out how to index a decentralized network for search engines completely replacing Reddit.
It’s easy to index decentralized networks is literally Google. Every website is decentralized from every other website the fact that Lemmy/kbin/Masterson sites can communicate with each of the doesn’t really make any difference.
I wonder if search engines will see content duplicated across multiple instances and derank them thinking it’s SEO spam. Or maybe I’m overthinking since google is already full of SEO spam.
You can use Lemmy Explorer to search through all 900 or so Instances for the communities you’re interested in.
As soon as the threat was made all the mods should have quit. An unmoderated reddit would collapse in hours. It would have been glorious.
This is true. I suspect for many mods the power they have to push their ideas, ideals and beliefs and punish who they see fit more than makes up or the fact that they do it for free.
I don’t want to be incendiary, but aren’t they just getting new mods? Are the new people going to show up and wreck the place for fun?
Its not just replacing mods though. Take the issue that happened with that snack sharing subreddit. The current mods held it for 10+ years. They built several tools that automated verification and rating people who shared with each other and it prevents a LOT of drama and scams. Then reddit replaced them because of the protest. But what about the automated tools that they personally made for “their” sub. The owner of those tools took them down. The new mod put them back up. They will die on the 30th anyways because they wont make the API requirements and if they are forced to stay up byt he new mods then the person who will have to pay reddit for the API usage is no longer the mod there.
This is not a unique situation either. Tons of people made auto moderation bots and tool over the past 16+ years. Most of those tools break today and if the mods are replaced then those tools are stolen from the owners. If the owners remove the tools reddit sees that as protesting and removes the mods.
It’s going to be a train wreck and a legal nightmare.
Even in a perfect world you are replacing mods that know the communities and have created them and worked on them for years with a new set of mods with no attachment or experience running those communities.
If they’re that important then pay them.
One of the comments on the Verge article, that I agree with:
There’s nothing wrong with the mods being volunteers. Reddit just needs to respect them (and the other users) more. In fact if the mods were paid employees there’d just be even less standing in the way of these administration deuchebag moves. And I think that if they were paid hires there’d be less assurance that the mods were truly interested in the subject matter of their subs - I’m just hypothesizing there. Anyway I don’t think the volunteer model wasn’t working. It’s the admin layer outside the mods that’s broken.
Wikipedia is proof that volunteers are very useful. But when you build a site like that, is better to keep your profit obsession low, be glad you are leaving something useful for humanity while living a comfortable life.
Yeah, people will do something just for fun, to profit personally, or to spite someone
The moment they realize someone is making money off it, they start getting FOMO - humans are very loss adverse. No one wants to miss out on free money
But what if they had turned around and said, “fine, we’ll start hiring you guys. You’ll get paid hourly, but you’ll have to do the proper paperwork, be given guidelines from corporate, reviewed on your performance regularly, and you might be relocated to undermoderated subs”?
Most of them wouldn’t be into it - they don’t actually want to work for Reddit, they just don’t like feeling like someone else is sitting back and living off their work while they get nothing. The reality is, they’re not doing a job, and they generally don’t want to be (there’s a difference between a job and work, especially work that benefits others vs a job protecting the cash cow)
When someone does a service for you, you act grateful and offer them lemonade and gift cards, you don’t try to turn it into a job, and you sure as hell don’t break their tools and ask when they’ll get back to work
