Technology

I think the growth of Lemmy over the last few weeks is a clear indicator that Reddit is in decline. I have deleted Apollo and my reddit bookmark and have only gone back when a Google search provided the information I needed. I won't be going back and I think a lot of people are of the same mind.

Yeah Digg didn’t die in a day. It takes time. I joined lemmy today, but I looked into it a few weeks ago first. It wasn’t worth the effort then, it is now. Having an Apollo-like app is a big help too.

Every previous major exodus had the problem that it was the people everyone was better off without leaving. Maybe you hated Reddit in 2015 and were pissed at their decisions, but the alternative was a place dedicated to mocking fat people and saying slurs.

Comparatively lemmy just kinda has a similar vibe to Reddit. Like I need to look for equivalents to some spaces I miss, but it’s not the people we said good riddance to

It's been fascinating to watch the corporate web ecosystem that rose in the late 2000s slowly start to collapse.

Also: we're still not going to pay you, but treat you worse. And if you quit, and the people after you keep quitting... we're going to have to replace you with PAID moderators... and if you play your cards right and we forget who you are, you might be one of those paid mods, so uh... shut up and get back to work for free!

if 10% of the moderators hang up their aprons, then Reddit has 14,000 unmoderated subreddits

Not exactly. Most subs have more than 1 moderator.

I don't think he knows what he's doing.. in his mind he's running the last meter of the finish line to the IPO when all these "problems" are cropping up for "no reason" and he just wants to finish the race

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.

FTFY.

The users are the product being sold to the advertisers. Framed that way, it makes it even more clear how idiotic driving away users is.

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.

No one needs to pay them. Not being treated like garbage is sufficient.

All they had to do was allow Reddit premium users to access the site using third-party apps.

People just need to change their attitude for how they interact with Reddit now. Gone are the days of good faith and honest interaction. I'll happily lurk and absorb content and provide no interaction back, not wasting my time curating / generating content for them anymore.

Reddit will REALLY be good when those apathetic users are all that's left to produce content and moderate subs! /s

My theory is he's heard Musk brag about how he's made Twitter profitable, and only lost bots and scammers - the users and advertisers all came crawling back (without releasing numbers)

No way that's true, but every owner of social media seems to have paid attention. They want to believe it - there's growing pressure to turn a profit now, so when someone tells you "the users might get mad, but they'll come crawling back if you stand firm" they pay attention

It's pretty easy to convince someone of something so convenient

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.

Ever worked somewhere where management got cleaned out and replaced with new people who had no existing connection to the place?

Bad mods have always been an issue, but for most places there would at least be some sort of chain of succession where the person who started the community brought on somebody they thought was good, and so on. Most places in having multiple mods would have crossover between new and old mods.

Nuking all that and appointing some rando has a much higher chance that the new mod is going to be bad. Look at the snackexchance drama where some rando totally “randomly” got appointed head mod and his first action was talking about getting government ID verification going for exchanges without asking the community anything.

Reddit will likely be able to subdue most subreddits eventually, but the time and effort spent doing so will be wasteful and publicly ugly as they parade in various mods, and have to step in to crack down on userbases bent on being disruptive.

This is a common argument that I usually see people making, there are a few big problems though with the idea of just getting new moderators. The first problem is that moderation is difficult. It's really easy to look at online posts talking shit about moderators and think that you could do a better job than them but you couldn't and neither could most people, it is a very tedious and difficult process, while there may be many people who are willing to do it there are not as many people who are cut out to do it.

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. This is a problem because it means that even for seasoned moderators content moderation is going to become increasingly difficult. Now imagine for somebody who isn't a seasoned veteran moderator, who was freshly appointed by Reddit's administration to fill the roles of mods who quit. I imagine they're probably not going to be able to do this job effectively.

Even If you hired a paid moderator team they would still be nowhere near as effective as the volunteers who poured their heart and soul into it, especially considering that those moderators will be working regular jobs. They're not going to be able to moderate to the lengths that an unpaid volunteer could. This is also ignoring the fact that Reddit very much cannot afford to appoint paid administrators to moderate all of the largest subs on Reddit, considering that making a lot of money is their goal that just isn't sustainable.

So yeah while they could get new moderators it would not be a very easy task for them, and would definitely come with severe drawbacks. Obviously Steve Huffman doesn't really care, he'll probably try it anyway and who knows maybe it'll seem to work out short term, 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. A good thing to keep in mind is that the scammers are watching this scenario, they've already started using it to their advantage by messaging moderators pretending to be administrators as a phishing attack. An experienced mod might be able to Ward this off or not be affected, but in unexperienced mod may fall for this kind of attack without knowing better.

Well, it survived all 11 years of my tenure so...