Think this case in particular is pretty interesting. Former default subreddit and one of the largest on the site (Top 20 at least).
I think /r/videos is where we’ll see how things actually play out with the reddit admins. I’m guessing at some point the admins will step in and replace the mods.
See this is the problem with reddit. On a site like Twitter, pissing off your power users doesn’t matter much. If anything you lighten the server load some if they leave. You have plenty of users to replace them.
On reddit, pissing off the power users means losing the unpaid volunteers keeping your site running. Sure, reddit can just reopen the sub, and probably will. But who’s going to moderate it? A sub that big needs a serious mod team. What happens if several other large subs follow them? How is reddit planning to staff all these subs? Will whoever they grab know what they’re doing? If enough mod teams resigned in one go reddit would have no way to keep the site working. Even if they find new volunteers it doesn’t mean they’ll know how to moderate a huge community.
Preaching to the choir here, but indefinite blackout is only thing worth doing
I don’t think Reddit cares if for 2 days their users drop
I’m guessing at some point the admins will step in and replace the mods.
100%.
I’d be surprised if /r/videos stays dark past the cutoff date of the original blackout.
The pretense of Reddit being open, fair, and ran by the users is long dead. Reddit is now closer to something like Facebook than it is to the site I joined in 2010. The only different is that Facebook pays their moderation staff.
So what you’re saying is it’s now worse than Facebook. Yikers!
Yeah, sometimes if Reddit doesn’t like the vibes of mods they will replace the mods by some supermods and other people.
I’m enjoying the drama just a bit too much I think. There’s something quite satisfying when the ‘product’ bites back.
The apathy spez has for the users is on show every time he does anything.
omg, kbin and Lemmy are about to get hit with waves of new users. the poor servers
I hope the current mods are serious and have a fail safe process to remove all sub reporting rules, AutoMod, and other restriction.
If reddit admins resort to forced take over, let the sub reset and be open to all videos extreme, nsfw, gore, and bot post. Let’s see how well the sub is without mods.
Would be sorted out in minutes.
Everything posted/done on reddit is stored. If a mod/mod team goes rogue reddit removes the mods and hits the big “go back an hour” button, installs some new mods and most people wouldn’t even know something happenedOnly if those new mods know what they’re doing. Reddit will run out of people who know what they’re doing very quickly. Filling mod positions with randos isn’t the same as successfully running a community.
People might find this link handy. It shows a list of the subs that have committed to the blackout and shows when they have gone private
In your posted link, are subs in green glowing font already dark? Is that what that means?
Yes, that’s what it means. If you look under the names, you’ll see “public” or “private.” The way they are going offline is to make the subreddits private. The green ones are labeled private.
I wonder if many other subs will stay dark past the initial going dark protest. I just happen to exclusively use Apollo and have for years, so I support the mods in what they are doing.
It’s one hell of a brave move. i think reddit will just re-open the subreddit and put new mods in though. sadly
They 100% will. The sad truth is that, despite all the protest threads, there’s still a lot of users who have no clue what’s going on. In nearly every thread, I’ll see comments from people saying that this is the first they’re hearing of it.
The fact is that Reddit knows that a LOT of people have no clue about any of this, that they don’t care, and that they will continue using the site on the official app and won’t notice anything has changed even though the mods of all their favorite subs are being replaced with scabs.
I posted a slightly longer comment about this downthread but unlike other websites like twitter, reddit relies on users to be moderators. This is the one site that can’t afford to lose their power users, you can replace them with scabs but the scabs probably don’t know how to moderate a community that large and if enough big community mods quit reddit will never catch up. This is one of the only sites right now where the power users being happy actually does matter more than the average user, because they’re essentially staffing the site for free.
Their very first point in the Q&A section is an interesting point that I think many of the old-guard Redditors may take, especially those in moderator positions. It is well known that Reddit sub moderation is all done on a volunteer basis. If a substantial number of moderators across some of the larger subs also feel this way, Reddit could see a big decline in the quality of posts and also, possibly, a rise in rule-breaking/hateful content that would severely degrade the quality of the site. I remember seeing a handful of r/SubredditDrama posts about rogue moderators doing something akin to a ‘power trip’. I think some large sections of Reddit are in for a wild ride in the coming weeks/months.
Even if Reddit kicks these mods out and brings in their own, a lot of this moderation has been a labor of love and the replacements won’t be 1:1.
I mean the same thing is happening at Twitter, but most users are staying there because there’s nowhere to go. Bluesky is invite only and mastodon doesn’t have whatever celebs and influencers they follow (and no shade on these folks, I originally joined Twitter for a single person’s tweets).
This place is cool, but people will stay on Reddit as long as their communities do. And frankly I think most people are going to go to discord if Reddit does actually die, because most subreddits already have an associated discord channel
Twitter just needs warm bodies. Reddit relies on users to run the communities. That’s the difference. Reddit is the only big site right now where a small number of users leaving angrily can cause serious structural issues for them.
/r/music announced the same thing a few days ago. Hopefully other major subreddits join in as well. But as already mentioned, admins will probably just reopen them and throw in new mods.
You can’t throw just anyone in to moderate a gigantic subreddit. They can get a user on the mod list but that doesn’t mean they can mod and a poorly moderated subreddit doesn’t keep users around long.
