In a comment shared by r/Apple moderator @aaronp613, Reddit cited its Moderator Code of Conduct and said that it has a duty to keep communities “relied upon by thousands or even millions of users” operational. Mods who do not agree to reopen subreddits that have gone private will be removed.

If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team.

        • ErraticDragon@kbin.social
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          2 years ago

          Breaking strikes also works, unfortunately. Look at Air Traffic Controllers with Reagan, or the Pinkertons back in the late 19th century. If there’s a way to force compliance, they will. And there is.

          • crilen@kbin.social
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            2 years ago

            Difference here is, I don’t rely on reddit for income and have nothing to lose. They do.

            • ErraticDragon@kbin.social
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              2 years ago

              That’s not really the point, though. A strike works because the strikers are willing to lose their pay to force action. If the strikers can be replaced, then the strikers lose.

              What you’re saying is true: the strikers in this case have nothing to lose… except their partial control of Reddit. And Reddit will gladly take that from them.

              Once the subs are reopened, any ongoing strike will amount to angry people with no power shouting into the void.

              • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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                2 years ago

                Can they really be replaced, though? There aren’t an infinite number of people willing to do shitty internet janitorial work for free. You generally get two types of people to fill that role, those who are passionate about the subject and those who like having control.

                The passionate ones are rare and special, they make a community good. They’ll go away. The power-hungry ones might stick around. But they’ll make the subs worse, and they’re now serving at the whim of Reddit so they might not be so happy with that kind of “power” either. They could have so much more power - the power of the gods admins themselves - if they were to run their own instance on the Fediverse.

                Reddit may find enough scabs to keep the lights on, but if this was really a cost-free solution to Reddit’s problem they would have done it ages ago.

                • ErraticDragon@kbin.social
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                  2 years ago

                  They can throw money at it until it works out. Mods do good things, but the bulk of the work is relatively mindless, and easy to outsource.

              • tallwookie@lemmy.world
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                2 years ago

                can reddit actually afford to pay mods though? mods that can do the same level of work as the current, unpaid mods are doing right now?

                if they cant then the strike/protest is successful

                • ErraticDragon@kbin.social
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                  2 years ago

                  They wouldn’t want to pay someone to run communities, the “thinking” work that moderators do.

                  They won’t mind paying call-center-level employees/contractors to do the janitor work, the “unthinking” work, which is voluminous.

                  They only have to do it until more mods come on board.

                  And don’t forget they already have a lot of mods from subs that didn’t blackout at all, and likely some from subs that already reopened.

                  It will not be hard or too terribly expensive for them to keep things running well enough that the masses are placated.

              • aranym@lemmy.worldOP
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                2 years ago

                They can’t be replaced in this case - unless Reddit wants to spend lots of $$$ hiring moderators. As long as they leave that power to community mods, it is impossible for them to stop this type of protest.

                I do think there is a real possibility Reddit will consider this a long-term risk and replace them with paid mods.

          • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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            2 years ago

            or the Pinkertons back in the late 19th century

            The Pinkertons are still around, and still being engaged by companies. Just a few months ago Wizards of the Coast (publishers of Magic the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons) were caught using them to intimidate someone who had accidentally-but-legally received unreleased Magic cards into handing over the property.

              • porquenolosdos@exploding-heads.com
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                2 years ago

                I think they seriously overestimate how many users are going to really remain. Users go where the content is. Users will use 2 applications if the content is in 2 places. Once you get to that point reddit has nothing to offer. This will end badly for them.

                • kronicmage@lemmy.ca
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                  2 years ago

                  I do think you’re being a tad optimistic – many users of subs like /r/memes will probably keep chugging along and accept their reddit overlords indefinitely. But as long as enough power users leave such that the content feels noticably worse, I think reddit will still feel the hurt

  • LilBiFurious@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    Classic strikebusting. “Oh you won’t work for an increasingly bad shake? Guess I’ll put these scabs in place instead.”

    • Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net
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      2 years ago

      You mean a heavy handed approach and forcing your will on voluntary participants of your social media platform is bad for business?!?!

  • tallwookie@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    reddit has a duty to keep subreddits open if they dont want their IPO to die in a fire.

    reddit does not give a flying fuck about their users - it hasnt for quite some time.

    stay private/blacked out for eternity, let that platform collapse.

  • wicked82@readit.buzz
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    2 years ago

    This makes me think the protests are having more of an impact than they are admitting. Gotta be feeling a hit financially withs ads to make this sort of move this early. Oh well fuck em. Only reason I’ve visited in the past week was to nuke my 16 year old account.

  • tattooed_dude@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    Couldn’t agree more with you OP. As someone who often got discouraged from posting on Reddit, I’ve been making an effort to post more here and all the responses have been great. I think it helps that we’re all new here and all on this weird journey together. That being said, I’m so happy to be here with all of you!

  • rouxdoo@kbin.social
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    2 years ago

    Flash forward 8-10 months and the news post reads: “After catastrophic exodus Reddit asks to join the #fediverse to add content to platform in hopes of salvaging doomed IPO”

    • KoreanPerson@kbin.social
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      2 years ago

      They don’t need to ask to join.

      This actually will probably happen down the line. And reddit will only keep its user base if they provide a better ui.

      Lmao there’s no way reddit figures out how to make a ui. They’re doomed if the fediverse keeps growing

      • CoderKat@kbin.social
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        2 years ago

        Honestly, Reddit is likely to keep on trucking with a decent sized user base no matter what. A massive number of people aren’t gonna leave, if for nothing but simply not wanting to have to change. I think the most likely thing that happens is that Reddit loses a small chunk of people, their growth heavily slows due to competition and a slow trickle of people leaving (but likely offset by the network effect still favouring them for new people), and they take a revenue ding because advertisers aren’t gonna like all this drama.

        The Fediverse will probably have a bit more rapid growth as the blackouts still continue in some subs and more people become aware of alternatives to Reddit, but then just grows slowly, with usability being the big barrier to massive adoption.

        • awderon@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          Mostly power users will leave for something else, which in turn leads to worse content on Reddit.

          • EvilEwok@lemmy.world
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            2 years ago

            power users and mods leaving. The big key is how moderation continues on reddit. whether the scab mods and those that stayed are able to control the bots and spam or not. if they can, then reddit continues mostly as normal.

        • DudePluto@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          Probably the most realistic comment here. Changes may come, quality may decline, but reddit is here to stay

      • ethane@kbin.social
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        2 years ago

        Reddit spent years coming up with the shitty new.reddit UI. By the time they improve it again, humans would have landed on Mars

        • Overzeetop@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          I think you should put “improve” in quotes. Someone might accidentally think you surf new reddit, and I’d hate for anyone to think that of me.

      • rouxdoo@kbin.social
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        2 years ago

        But the instances need to allow their participation and many will not without a hat in hand.

    • Skray@kbin.social
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      2 years ago

      Yes, they installed a new head mod and the new head mod bans anyone who brings it up. The new mod is a moderator of 106 different subreddits.
      The funny thing is that many people remaining on reddit have been praising the admins for threatening to remove mods, because they hate the power mods who control all the subs and want to see them removed, but that’s exactly who reddit is using to replace the mods they dislike.

    • nosut@lemmy.world
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      No. The short story there was an inactive mod was top mod and came back just to make the whole sub private and got backlash from the most active mod about it. Admins ended up removing the inactive mod. There is additional back and forth between the two that got posted but it basically ends as the one actually doing the work gained full control.

  • OtakuAltair@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    Remember guys, best thing you can do to get people to move off of reddit is to post more on Lemmy and Kbin

    For communities you want but don’t exist on either of them yet, make it! And crosspost to other comms so people know it exists!

  • janAkali@lemmy.one
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    2 years ago

    They have two options: either hire someone and pay them to mod subreddits or open positions to (even more then currently) unreliable powertripping users who will destroy the platform.
    I’m fine with both options. I’m not going back, btw.

    • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.ca
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      2 years ago

      That’s the thing, they are pissing on people that do unpaid, free modding. Reddit relies on free workers and that means you have to show appreciation, not piss on them. The next batch sees it and guess what they won’t step up.

  • uhauljoe@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    Mods don’t have a duty to do shit, Reddit doesn’t pay them anything, doesn’t even offer premium at a discount or anything.

    Maybe if Reddit was more concerned with not creating a toxic hellspace, they wouldn’t need to rely on volunteers to keep their billion dollar corporation running smoothly. Everything about this pisses me off so fucking bad.

    Where do they get off saying mods have a DUTY to them, when they LITERALLY are volunteers and reddit gives them nothing.

    And maybe if Reddit wasn’t killing third party mod tools…like the moderation still isn’t gonna be the same no matter how many people you appoint bc you killed the tools that made it possible.

    • sznio@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      Reddit doesn’t pay them anything, doesn’t even offer premium at a discount or anything.

      But it offers them a tiny bit of power, via being a internet janitor. I’m certain that there’s a decent amount of people who will jump at the opportunity to become a moderator of a large subreddit. They are obviously the worst people to wield such power - just like anyone in the real world who seeks power is least likely to use it for good.

      Moderation will be low quality, but it will remove spam. As long as the content mill keeps running all is fine. Users of the tiktokified official Reddit app won’t even notice a thing.

    • KawaiiMathematician@discuss.tchncs.de
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      At least it’ll fall apart entirely once they appoint kids who desperately want to be Reddit mods after no one else will do it. If they want to run every subreddit themselves, they can, but it will only hurt them immensely.

  • hildegunst@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    If your platform depends on the labor of unpaid volunteers, threatening them is not only super shitty, it’s also generally a really bad idea

    Fuck /u/spez

  • PutangInaMo@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    Whatever this turns out to be it will establish a precedent that all social media conglomerates will set the bar at.