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“Reddit cannot survive without its moderators. It cannot.” - The Verge (www.theverge.com)

submitted 1 year ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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.

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[–] Piers@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The second problem is that the API changes that Reddit has imposed will make content moderation ever more difficult due to the loss of automated tools that help. People are going to bring up reddit’s promise to bring moderating tools to the mobile app or to improve moderation tools in general, this is most certainly an empty promise and even if fulfilled they will do the absolute bare minimum.

r/ZeroWaste has had to close comments due to spam comment-bots promoting a retail website that the built in tools cannot deal with. Since they can no longer use the third party tools they rely on to handle issues like that they're just not able to operate the sub anymore and are recommending their users visit !zerowaste@lemmy.ml instead.

the new moderators won’t really be put to the test until they have to deal with a large scale bot attack, either coordinated or uncoordinated.

That same ZeroWaste post claimed that as of 17 hours ago SpambotSwatter had a 200k+ backlog in theeir span detection system. The sharks were already circling the water waiting for the defences to drop. I suspect there will be a big increase in spam through this weekend. The question is what that will lead to? Will Reddit magically produce a way to fill in for the lost functionality and solve the issue? Will the flood of disruptive comments just be accepted as the new normal? Will it cause enough disruption to otherwise uninterested users to drive an unignorable level of people kicking up a fuss or just dropping their usage?

I suspect it'll be the worst possible outcome but I guess we just have to wait and see what happens.

Edit: by worst possible outcome I mean worst possible outcome for Reddit's username not for Reddit as a business sadly.

[–] Liempong_pagong@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And you just convinced me to delay my reddit account deletion by 1 week.

I must watch this with my own eyes, no matter what.

[–] Piers@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

If I can convince you to go a step further... Deleting your account (at least in the near-term) may not be the best course of action. Simply deleting your account does not delete the content you created on Reddit nor (afaik) all the data they hold on you and allows them to continue to profit from those things. Once you've deleted your account you are no longer able to directly delete the content made by that account. Deleting all your content first is a good start however that's a long-term process as any comments or posts you've made to subs that are currently privated are harder to remove and when and if those subs become public again your content comes back with it. So from that perspective it's probably worth keeping your account and checking it is empty from time to time. There's also been some accusations of Reddit undeleting comments but it's not clear if that's what's really happening. If it is a concern though, editing your comments first should mean only the edited versions could come back. Most people edit to a blank comment but you could edit to say something about why you are removing your content from Reddit. Leaving those comments in place so you've removed your content but are showing why (and where else similar content can be found...) is probably the best option. As for the data they hold on you. I'm not sure exactly how much they would keep if you just deleted your account but there's a good chance there is some sort of data privacy law you could use to request they tell you and or delete all of it. Certainly within the EU and UK you have some sort of right to be forgotten.