I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, democracy simply doesn’t work
If userbases vote for mods you will get an absolute cesspit. It has not worked in the past when subreddits have done it willingly, and it will not work in the future.
I think this is a bluff tbh. He has seen it fail in the past every single time it has been willingly implemented by a subreddit. It doesn’t work. The userbases do not participate enough to know whether certain people running to be mod are good or not.
It would also completely remove “ownership” of a subreddit from moderators, meaning that there is essentially no incentive to do it, no feeling of reward for your hard work because your community is yours. They will kill all motivation for moderators.
If he’s dumb enough to actually allow voting for mods, we should just brigade that shit and use the mod positions to agitate. Otherwise it’ll just be 4chan doing it.
We should yes but every single event will become a “the tankies are trying to takeover” thing. And it will all be turned into anti-communism by a neoliberal-fascist alliance. We will lose that war. We will then be voted out of any positions we take.
Yeah hexbear tried the full democratic approach back in the chapo.chat days and it flopped hard.
While I disagree with some of the decisions made since then, the site is now very functional, fun to use and engage in, and not in a permanent state of :blob-on-fire: . Can’t ask for anything better really.
old heads remember when beatnik promised admin elections
in hindsight, yeah that would never have worked
still pissed me off though lmao
Imagine who would be the admins lol.
We had idiots on here voting to change the community names from c/chat to c/hat, I’m sure an admin election would’ve gone down well haha.
I think this is a bluff tbh.
Idk, maybe, I do feel that he’s dumb enough to actually do it. I mean I feel like he has already made so many unforced errors, like randomly accusing the apollo dev of blackmail, and then doubling down in the ama.
How the fuck would it even work?
What happens when a modteam simply removes all meta-discussion about the subreddit? How the fuck do the users express or discuss with one another about being unhappy with the mods?
They can’t. All of that can be completely suppressed. You’d have to create a secondary “bullshit subreddit politics” space where moderators aren’t allowed to moderate in order for users to talk about moderation with one another.
And that space itself will be filled with debate about hatespeech, transphobia, all kinds of bullshit simply because it can’t be moderated by the mods.
All the “woke” mods on the site will get voted out by bands of roaming fascists doing takeovers of lgbt subreddits.
It’s a stupid fucking policy and there is absolutely no fucking way that they’re stupid enough to entertain it as any kind of possibility. This is a bluff, 100% bluff. The more I think about it the more ridiculous it gets.
You’re not wrong, I just think spez is an absolute moron. Would you have believed me if I told you elon musk was going to run twitter into the ground like he did?
If userbases vote for mods you will get an absolute cesspit. It has not worked in the past when subreddits have done it willingly, and it will not work in the future.
Most famously we tried it back in the early days of the website with the Republic of Reddit subreddits. Regular moderator elections and democratic control over the subreddit’s tone. It was killed by a complete lack of engagement, the only people seeking election being the ones who shouldn’t have power, and those mods then quitting before the next election because the job sucks. Those same problems would exist if reddit forces democracy on the users while giving the mods shittier tools to moderate with. If I could keep mods on r/snackexchange, a relatively low population subreddit, for more than a month then I’d have more than two active mods who both depend on multiple tools that the API changes will kill.
It was killed by a complete lack of engagement
Yeah exactly.
Users are not engaged enough and do not have enough incentive to do so. It takes a considerable amount of time and effort to know what’s going on and it’s BORING for 95% of people.
Reddit’s moderators are ultimately motivated by feeling like they “own” their communities. Reddit even knows this, which is why they have not infringed on moderators decisions about their own spaces as much as possible, the motivation of moderators is exceptionally important to the site. It is not only what keeps mods doing the work in spaces they currently run but also is what causes them to make new spaces.
It’s the only upside to moderating. I know r/modernart won’t have posts that aren’t about modernism if I’m actively removing the things which don’t fit the vision of the subreddit. I know r/snackexchange won’t be taken over by an import business or do corrupt promotions with them if I’m the person in charge and nobody except this one steak company has tried to bribe me. I know r/fifthworldproblems won’t become an even more cringe place taken over by Dr. Who/SCP/Star Wars fans if my first rule is that posts can’t reference existing canon. There’s no real power trip to it if the ants in your ant farm hate you, but the subreddit only has a defined purpose and culture if the same people are committed to those things.
Give it to someone apathetic or hostile to that original vision and the whole place goes to shit. The piggies only see shit, they see it get upvoted, and they only post shit because they know shit gets upvoted.
It would also completely remove “ownership” of a subreddit from moderators, meaning that there is essentially no incentive to do it, no feeling of reward for your hard work because your community is yours. They will kill all motivation for moderators.
i would argue that this is a plus point
with the exception of your good self of course
Yeah I agree. But the point is he doesn’t mean it. The tactic being deployed here is to kill popular support among the userbase so that moderators feel compelled to give up. This is why the “landed gentry” shit is being deployed and this is also why he’s going with “we’ll make it more democratic”.
His aim is to use the wider userbase against moderators, knowing full well that the wider userbase is already predisposed to being against mods in the first place.
The correct tactic for organisers to deploy here is “We’re happy to talk about adding more democracy to moderation if Huffman is happy to add more democracy to administrator decisions as well.” Turn it back on him. This all started because absolutely nobody wants to see Apollo or RiF shut down. That’s on reddit, they’re completely capable of solving that but don’t want to. They want them dead. If it were up to the userbase the users would be against it.
Online voting always fails because you can’t effectively limit one person to one vote. Anyone can make a trivial reddit botnet without paid proxies and spam the votes.
I’ve been watching user polls on various subreddits that have partially reopened. By and large the users want extensions to the strike, either in one week intervals or indefinitely. I’m just keeping mine closed indefinitely.
The more he’s forced to act, the greater the chance he’s going to Elon himself and fuck the whole platform up. Die reddit die.
The casual sports subreddits however, they just want their slop and to reopen
If any subreddit would immediately bend to treat hogs it’s a sport one. Half the reactionary shit I see on reddit comes from someone whose main subreddits are NFL ones. That’s where I think a crackdown on the strike is the necessary next step. If they aren’t willing to stand up for the initial demands, they’ll now see that they don’t have control over the subreddit anyway. Either reddit will mod coup them or the users will. There’s no more downside to striking and depending on how much Spez fucks up the crackdown they’re going to see really toxic results from it. Hopefully that sets up a second wave of protests which have more universal mod/user-centric goals.
Yeah, even if the userbase is not reactionary, they just want to post about the favourite sport and it’s understandable why they want the subreddits to reopen. At the end of the day they just want a casual social media experience while putting in zero work themselves to get such, and don’t really understand the cluster fuck that Reddit is.
“Huffman said he wasn’t considering changes that would centralize power within Reddit as a company, such as having Reddit’s paid staff take on more of the duties of moderation.”
Well no shit, then they’d have to pay them.
Lmao so he still wants people to run the website for free 🤣. But only using the official Reddit tools that haven’t delivered on their own seven year old promises. They literally promised certain features almost a decade ago, and they’re still not implemented.
If the recent history of enshittification on the internet is any guide, it’s more likely that it will lead to a situation where it’s intentionally vague what’s a subreddit-as-business and what’s a regular sub. And I’m sure we’d see algorithm games where the subs that pony up extra cash appear higher in searches and are more likely to be in the Recommended For You subreddits.
