Notice that they circumvented democratic decision-making between moderation teams to force subreddits open. 1/10 mods wants it open = open. Why would they not do the same here with users, whom they respect even less?
I suspect they will do one or more of the following:
- selectively honor results based on when the users of subreddits opt to open them.
- never open voting in subreddits where mods choose to open the subreddit
- set voting window to align more closely with timezones with demographics that will favor opening.
- use their powers from hosting the platform to fuck with results (i.e. voting only working from new reddit or official app, shadowbans, fucking with login/voting of anyone who has posted the word “lemmy”, etc.)
- All of the above.
This should be a lesson on how corporations embrace democracy within a system that they ultimately control to let people believe they have some form of self-determination.
EDIT: Markdown formatting
Honestly, they’re just using the democracy thing to look like the good guys. But employees have already been quoted saying “we’ll force reopen subreddits if we have to, to save the company.” They seem to believe that’s justified. Plus, who is gonna vote against reopening? The users still active didn’t care enough to boycott or switch platforms, so the majority of active users probably do want to reopen. So I doubt they’d mess with results; most votes will be in their favor, and their rationalization for using force will resonate with the remaining users.
How about letting redditors vote out CEOs?
How about letting redditors vote that CEOs shouldn’t get a golden parachute?
How about shareholders sacking a paedophile CEO for gross misconduct with no golden parachute?
One can only dream.
The way this is unfolding is like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
Oh Steve, you just loves to digg Reddit’s grave.
For a guy who claims the blackout isn’t affecting reddit, he sure is worried about getting the blackout done and over with.
Lol right? “This is just another day at Reddit, blackout isn’t hurting us” then talks about the blackout nonstop since it started.
As a mod, the users demanded we blackout. Some tech groups didn’t want to and the users argued them into it.
All lies, they‘ve straight up been removing mods like they want to cleanse them from the website and forcibly reopen their subs, NO voting on it! It‘s “reopen of gtfo”, that‘s the message they are sending.
This moral appeal to democracy is transparent and laughable, they must think Redditors are completely brainless to swallow that turd, and maybe he is right seeing those who cheer for this.
I mean, a vote to get rid of mods is basically the same as “reopen or gtfo”. The people who feel strongly about the blackout have already left, the only people voting would be those who just want to be able to scroll again
The biggest middle-finger to him would be if really all “restive” subreddits agree on re-electing their respective mods.
The biggest middle-finger to him would be if really all “restive” subreddits agree on re-electing their respective mods.
This is the main reason why I won’t go scorched earth and delete my account there. If there are polls on this, I want to be part of it. All the people who cared enough about the blackout to leave and delete their accounts last week are dead to Steve, he can’t monetize them anymore.
Although that’s not to say the blackout has had no effect on me. I’m here now, after all, and will probably end up splitting my attention here even if Reddit rethinks things.
He and Reddit by extension is dead to me too so meh. I wish you good luck though and if you see juicy drama happening please repost it to Lemmy for our entertainment.
how is this process initiated? spez is using democracy as a buzzword. if these votes are user-initiated, it’s just going to become a method of hostile takeovers. if they’re admin-initiated, they’re obviously going to be used mostly in retaliation. if spez has a workable solution to both, he should say it, instead of throwing out buzzwords like reddit has done with free speech for its entire history
This will be difficult to accomplish on a notoriously botted platform.
Well, lemmy already taking Reddit Traffic, so why bother again… just let it rot!
In China people call it
LET IT ROT
He’s saying the same talking points at every interview and handling this situation like Chris Licht did before he got fired at CNN, had some ideas for change that people weren’t necessarily against but shove it down their throats with out any finesse or flexibility or fairness and everyone is unhappy and it exposed the true motive. Licht \ CNN was being forced to the right by the owner and billionaire investors, and Reddit is just plain forcing out 3rd party apps (that helped build reddit in the first place, and have been open to paying a reasonable amount for api access) to try and boost revenue. My favorite take on all this is from Arstechnica:
But Reddit’s biggest asset is its community. Charging for its API may be a necessary evil to survive an uncertain future, but Reddit’s attitude against its own community isn’t. Reddit is burning bridges on its quest for cash without showing an ounce of sympathy.
Yeah, spez is treating striking mods like spoiled toddlers, but insisting on making money himself while making their unpaid work harder. It’s eroding their good will to volunteer, for what future? Paid mods?
for what future? Paid mods?
No way, they’d need to pay 3 millions a year or so to replace all moderator work in the platform.
They’re trying to optimise the company for the IPO, showing stuff like “you can sell this data to Google for LLM! It’s self-moderated! No third party apps eating your adbux!”. It’s just that it’s backfiring… badly.
I said it in another thread but it seems like the past year has been a lot of masks off for the owner class utterly losing it about the peasants not getting in line.
Honestly I wonder if the isolation they’ve had over the past few years has left their reality testing a bit off
It’s just being handled so poorly. They could have just been straight forward and said they unfortunately needed to cut off API access due to cost but that they are dedicated to improving the official app based on user feedback over the course of a year to help with moderation and fix all the quirks on mobile. It still would have been unfortunate to lose third party apps, but at least it would have shown that they cared about the user experience. But no, we get this beat around the bush, insulting attitude from the CEO. He just sounds so out of touch.
They could have slowed the roll of shitty changes and successfully boiled the frog without much uproar.
- Block unauthenticated, no-API-key access outright, but allow app API keys a smaller number of requests per day, making apps more unreliable if not using a user’s personal key.
- Block unauthenticated non-user API keys and force users to generate their own API keys, killing off most 3rd-party app usage and almost all anonymous usage.
- Raise the price of API keys once few people are using 3rd-party apps.
They aren’t even competent bastards.
They should tied third party app access to reddit premium
Final tally is in. 11,000 of the 10,000 subscribers have voted to remove the mod effective immediately.
You are now moderator of r/democratic-peoples-republic-of-reddit
“But we haven’t even implemented the voting feature yet!” -u/DELETED
[ Removed by Reddit ]
I feel like having people vote on moderators would be an improvement but how can you complain about the lack of democracy when you are literally Reddit.
I really disagree, moderators need to make unpopular decisions sometimes to keep communities intact. Online polls are notoriously easy to game as well.
If the users want to kill their own community with bad decisions, that is their right. A mod shouldn’t get to stop it.
Normally I’d agree with voting on moderators, but at this time, spez would just manipulate the votes against the protesting mods.
In another context, detached from Reddit burning, I feel like this could be an improvement; but only if done right. Here odds are that they’d do it wrong, rushed, and it would make the subreddits worse instead of better.
The main problem that I see is how to define who’s part of the community, and who isn’t, in a form that:
- prioritises content creators over lurkers
- prioritises lurkers over people who don’t engage the community, not even passively
- avoids bots flinging decisions back and forth
- avoids raiding/brigading skewing up the votes
There’s also the issue with conflicts of interest between 2+ legit chunks of the community. Specially on the scope of a community, if “wide” (shallow content, but more approachable for everyone) or “deep” (well-developed content, but less approachable for most people). If done wrong you’d have only “wide” communities, and people who want deeper discussions would be effectively deplatformed.
Those things are not unsolvable matters, mind you. But I don’t think that Reddit is able to solve them before crashing.
Actually… Reddit has been experimenting with this for a few years in r/cryptocurrency where people earn “moons” depending on a series of rules based on their engagement, submissions, number of upvotes, community participation, and so on.
It’s mostly led to people gambling the system to earn money.
I definitely don’t think the current system is ready to be deployed on a site wide scale, but it would be interesting to see them try 🍿🍿
That’s interesting. I wonder how much of the gambling was intrinsic to the idea, and how much it was caused by how and where (like, you’re dropping a new crypto in a comm where people try to make money from crypto. Of course you’ll get some abuse)
Another scenario that could ruin this idea would be well-organised infiltration - like a half dozen posters coordinating to game the system together, so they have more power than they should, until they can force the community to become something else.
but it would be interesting to see them try 🍿🍿
Yes! Specially pre-IPO. Investors really do not like things changing suddenly, as they increase the associated risk.
[soapbox]Guys, remember: spez is just the sacrificial goat*. They’ll let him take the unpopular decisions, then “fire” him, then plenty users will go like “WE DID IT REDDIT! WE SAVED REDDIT! SPEZ IS GONE”. It was just like this with Ellen Pao.
The whole company is scum and not even firing spez should be considered enough.[/soapbox]
*I apologise to any caprine being who might be offended by the comparison.
Eh… I wouldn’t put Ellen Pao and spez in the same category. Ellen was always going to be the interim CEO, but spez is the cofounder turned CEO. He’s managed to turn anger against both himself and Reddit.
It’s less about them being in the same category and more about Reddit Inc. using them the same way. In a corporation, even the co-founder is discardable, if deemed unfit for corporate consumption.
(He deserves it though. YMMV on Pao, she always sounded way more genuine than spez IMO.)
