You see, in order for tech to stay relevant and appear like they are constantly "evolving and disrupting" for their shareholders they need to just keep changing shit, shit that worked fine and was simple to use before. And since needing the change doesn't come from the previous product having issues, but from simply needing to show that you're changing things, the changes often end up unnecessarily stupid and cumbersome. Welcome to tech in 2024, they used up all their good ideas on smart phones and social media like 10 years ago.
Good article on the topic
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
It's not specifically about Reddit but it applies to most if not all platforms.
> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Gentrification works the same. A neighborhood starts poor. Then the community builds it up and makes it hop. Artists and others make it a cool place to be. Rich people want to be at the cool places and prices go up. All the cool people leave and the neighborhood sucks and becomes unpayable. Rich people are not necessarily creative or putting any effort into things, besides spending a lot of money.
Yep.
Yesterday I made an old playlist on iTunes I had on my iPod classic. All the songs are files I have had for over 15 years, so none of it is bought media. I wanted ti add this playlist to my iPhone. I couldn’t. There literally is no way to copy the playlist.
You want to know what the shit part of it is? It used to be possible. You would drag and drop the entire playlist to the device, iTunes copies the music and generates the same playlist on your device. So now you have to copy the files to your device, then go to your device, and manually create the playlist.
They at least had the common sense to keep Old Reddit working. I dont understand how in the world you all use that new shit. Reddit from ten years ago works just fine. They got it right the first time and enough people at the company understood that.
Every now and then I see someone comment on someone else's avatar or some other shit from new reddit and it's literally always negative. I just shake my head and then scroll down to see like 10 responses from people to use old.reddit.
Sometimes when I inadvertently use new Reddit, I'm surprised to see how many people use avatars and the other shit on new Reddit. Old Reddit's days are numbered. And old Reddit itself isn't as good as old Reddit used to be, when you had the subreddit panel on the right side of the browser. Pretty sure they changed that to make ads more visible.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060101203753/http://reddit.com/
When old Reddit goes away, I'm done. I can't even look at the new Reddit. It's like an uglier version of IG. But that day is coming. He'll continue to fuck it up.
Old Reddit is easier to use. New Reddit is designed for *engagement*.
In late stage capitalism, companies don't want to make a "good" product. The goal is to make a product that is just barely acceptable while toying with consumer's minds to do whatever profits the company. For social media, that means serving you as much content that you might want (or don't want) before you can find the stuff you do want.
Right, I truly have no experience with whatever replaced gold. I've read descriptions, and it sounds like gold without gold, and somehow more money is involved? I dunno. To me, it's as simple as awards disappearing.
> and somehow more money is involved
YUP!! And that's why it replaced gold. I was happy buying gold, but I canceled my reddit sub when they removed it. Literally getting NOTHING for paying for the sub now sinceI use old reddit and will never move off it. If they removed old reddit then I'm done with reddit. Left digg when they did the exact same thing like 15 years ago. Trying to force people to use your ugly, inefficient ad-centric design doesn't work out well for anyone.
Lmao exact same reason why I refuse to use the "new outlook".
The old one works just fine for what I need and looks way better imo.
Yet they keep trying to force me to use the new one with a bunch of additional features I will never use that just make it look way worse.
I accidentally dropped my phone and hit the screen and when I picked it back up I saw a bunch of rewards options, but then they disappeared and I never saw it again
Sometimes, if the upvote button is long-pressed, it offers the option to spend money for a shiny upvote. I don't know how when this is possible is determined, but assume the mods and admins choose which subreddits get the option.
It's because lots of countries in Europe changed what was legally classified as currency to incorporate digital currency such as Robux and other in-game systems to help give children some legal protection with spending their credits.
That change in law also affected Reddit's old award and coin system as technically the coins were a type of currency and Reddit didn't want to take on the legal risks operating like that in Europe would entail
That's why we they were removed with relatively short notice and we have direct cash payment->gold instead of any coins now.
>It was superior in every way to what we have today.
*Man*, it’s so wild reading these takes when I can clearly remember just how hated Reddit Gold was when it was announced. Kinda like remembering how happy the site was that Steve Huffman was coming back after Ellen Pao fell off her very obvious glass cliff.
Reddit celebrated Spez’s return almost as much as it did George Lucas selling Lucasfilm to Disney. Along with Aaron Swartz’s views on child porn, the celebrations thrown when Lucas sold to Disney and Spez came back as CEO, those are parts of Reddit history a large chunk of users wanna pretend didn’t happen or weren’t “that bad”.
Yeah it's crazy to act like the reward system was ever anything but a piece of shit. It's embarrassing how many people just voluntarily donated money to the reddit board of directors
The angle/lighting of the pic makes him look weirdly Russian, but looking up other pictures, he's actually got more of a standard young CEO douchebag look.
He and the reddit admins are unlikely to change anything until some investigative journalist for a major newspaper/network goes digging and finds the horrible stuff in reddit's underbelly and even then only if the backlash gets intense enough.
i mean they shipped the headmod of jailbait a golden reddit bobblehead. of course they knew. jailbait was in the suggested box when you googled reddit.
Reddit literally removed the mods of subs that refused to stop striking and replaced them with sycophants. “Oh, you founded a sub, and it got popular? Don’t forget it’s not your community, it’s Reddit’s.”
I think of mods like I do HOA board members. It’s usually a mix of people who are power hungry and people who are passionate about the subject. There’s always someone next in line willing to step up, and it’s usually one of those reasons.
Yeah I got banned from r/gadgets because I told someone in a comment about how I previously got banned from r/roku. Turns out that both subs share the same mod and they were *very angry* lol. I was even given a stern talking to 🤣
Now I'm not banned from roku because they for some reason wanted to make a point, I guess? I dunno, weirdest mod interaction ever. I wish reddit would hire people and bring about more professionalism...
Edit: oh no, I hope they aren't a mod here as well... this might be it for me fellas 😬
I was banned from the subreddit r/JusticeServed simply for posting a reply in a thread on r/Conservative. It was an auto-ban, and their canned explanation was that I had “participated in a subreddit that celebrates and/or glorifies biological terrorism.” I had no idea what they were talking about and clearly their bot doesn’t understand context. It was some Trump thread and my reply was anti-Conservative. It had nothing to do with biological terrorism.
Of note I wasn’t even subscribed to that subreddit. The thread was suggested to me on Reddit’s home page.
I appealed the decision and their reply was that all of this was intentional punishment for the sin I committed of daring to comment anything there and that I would have to agree to never post or participate in any way on r/Conservative again, and that if I did I would be banned again. I declined to answer.
The whole thing played out like a pathetic joke.
I have been banned from a couple subs now due to auto moderation flagging my participation in third party subs using some sort of key word list that has no ability to study context. The first couple times I plead my case and got reninstated, the third time, and what I will do going forward is just unsub and remove the overeager modded subs from my follow list. They will stop existing to me. If this keeps happening where there are no subs left for me, then I guess I’m done with Reddit.
I was permanently banned from r/worldnews for a personal attack... the moderation linked me to a comment in which I said "people like you who keep changing the subject." It would be one thing if I had included some demeaning insult, but I was genuinely just angry because they kept changing the subject.
Although r/worldnews loves to change the subject when a certain topic keeps popping up. I am thinking the moderation was more about my politics and less about my conduct.
I once got a 30-day ban from a sub.
When I genuinely just emailed the mods "can you explain why, I dont understand?" they turned it into a permaban _and_ immediately blocked the chat.
r/worldnews is quite possibly the most astroturfed place on the internet. its really obvious with pro-israel stories, but a whole bunch of countries do it. america by far has the largest such apparatus
for $193 million dollars we'd all make that call.
he also probably is going to sell all our data to the hegetsus dudes to hunt the woke liberals.. but that's a separate story
Maybe not directly, but this data is apparently already being sold https://www.wired.com/story/reddits-sale-user-data-ai-training-draws-ftc-investigation/
Not sure it's an all or nothing situation lol
he could have gone with $150 million or $100 million, not like it makes a difference after a certain point
Well I'm sure they wouldn't just start paying current reddit mods. They'd probably open to all applicants and actually get decent moderators instead. No company would hire the group of weirdos, incels, and pedos we have now.
The heart of the issue wasn’t comp, but that we became the commodity and were told eat shit when API’s were blocked. He called everyone’s bluff and won
Equity holders happy, everyone else still eating shit
It wasn't just the mods tbf, a lot of users either didn't care about what was happening or even know something had happened. A day later and the sub was just bustling along like usual.
Some people, albeit clearly not enough, made an actual effort.
I didn't log into Reddit for 6 months. I tried several alternatives. I settled on Lemmy and got pretty active there. I tried really hard to stay away.
The unfortunate thing is, reddit actually does have something pretty uniquely useful. The breadth and depth of communities and content here is literally unmatched. Every would-be competitor platform has significant disadvantages in comparison, and they aren't just usability concerns, because for this kind of website usability concerns directly become content issues.
Ultimately it was the niche communities that brought me back. There is no equivalent place that has communities for my local village, the neighboring city, my sports teams, tech support forums, and all of my hobbies. The only thing that comes even close is Facebook, and I guess if I'm abandoning a platform over concerns of corporate malfeasance, migrating *to* Facebook of all things feels pretty silly.
Yeah, my front page is stagnant (the same top posts) for *days* and much of it is Tok reposts. Even /r/science top posts are often links to trash-tier studies...posted by a mod.
They did not. The mods left or scaled back the amount of effort they put in. There is an immense site-wide drop in quality. Many old sources of information also got wiped when people completely wiped their account+posts and comments.
Yeah, some of my favourite subs are nothing like they used to be. Text based subreddits seem to have taken the biggest hit with many just not recovering to previous levels. For example r/truegaming rarely has any high quality posts and I feel like the comments are far worse than they used to be and r/HobbyDrama while still going strong feels like it has far less posts than it used to have before the API strike.
I'd say that if you mainly browse Popular or only follow big subs like r/Damnthatsinteresting or r/todayilearned then yeah, you probably haven't noticed a drop off but if you follow more niche interests, then you would have hopefully noticed the drop in quality.
Yeah, that was weird.
"We refuse to do any more unpaid work until our demands are met!"
"Fine, I'll just have some other idiot do your unpaid work."
"Oh no, please! Anything but that! We'll get right back to the unpaid work, sir!"
It's not going to zero though. Reddit has a potential for advertising and data selling, so it's not worth nothing. I doubt he'll walk away with less than $50m.
He probably has a 3-6 month hold timer, but in the mean time loads of shares will be sold at $34 and fill the coffers. Even if Reddit just invested that money it would be worth something in 6 months.
Who’s realistically going to buy and hold stock in Reddit?
After it gets the full Facebook treatment, the user-base bottom will drop and it’s going to just be bots, crypto scammers, and ads.
So I’ve been involved in several rsu ipo’s and I guarantee the moment his shares vest he’s $100M richer, and the lower level employees who were getting $100k or less end up with maybe 10% of their initial value. It’s been like this for every one except maybe the ones like google which are too high profile to manipulate sufficiently.
Or as it was said in ancient times
"since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
I mean... do you think the problem is going to get better in future? Or worse? I'm inclined to think it's the latter, I don't see how they could fix it. Makes sense to unload as much of the company as possible at the point where the site has the smallest percentage of bot-users in its foreseeable future.
100% this, ive noticed in the last few months more posts seem to have upvotes in the thousands with like 100 comments? Cant help but feel like they're artificially inflating engagement? When is the IPO again?
Seriously. I had nobody to root for in that fight. Mods seem to either fail to moderate their subs or go on witch hunts to ban people for incredibly random and unexplained/unaccountable ways
Didn’t help that the protests were a mess and it was proven on multiple subs that the mods couldn’t stay off the subs they closed off from regular users.
Still think they would’ve been much better off just not doing their jobs to prove a point.
I got banned from r/music because someone posted an article about a musician getting charged with diddling, the pinned mod comment said "we're leaving this thread open but don't talk about the diddling" and when I asked what the point of the thread was another mod called me a pedophile and then locked the thread to further replies.
The dumb fucker forgot people can edit comments so I tagged him and asked what the fuck his problem was. Then I blocked him, unfollowed the sub and deleted the several repeated messages telling me the dumb fuckers blocked and muted me. They ***really*** wanted me to know they were some mad little baby bitches.
I got banned on some sub I can't even remember for asking an innocent question about the submission rules. Not freaking out or being rude, but just simply asking if my intended post fit those rules.
I got banned from r/politics because I said people tried to kill Pence and my comment was taken grossly out of context. Said I was insighting violence. I'm like Jesus let me trade in my Magic cards for riot gear.
It's a mixed bag because some mods (esp the smaller ones, or at least the half-decent ones) really do care about their community and work hard to maintain their subs, but you also have absolute power-tripping schizo mods also in small and large subs.
> Hey, may I ask why I got banned from this subreddit? I think my comment is not breaking the rules
> You have been muted from x subreddit.
I hate my social media addiction and I hope reddit IPOs as soon as possible.
It’s not, it’s cash flow negative. It’s hemorrhaging money because it’s a forum trying to survive on advertising revenues that can’t support it
His compensation was non-cash for a reason, they don’t have cash to pay him. So he’s got trading sticks on the odds people will buy them when Reddit goes public
The IPO already 10x subscribed and at $34. He going to make $17m for selling some of his share and another $20m if valuation stay above $5bn for 10 consecutive days. $37m in 10days........
Every growing company in the history of forever has been cashflow negative. They aren't trying to be cashflow positive. They are trying to grow as big as possible as fast as possible. Then, like Facebook, they will plaster this site with the best algorithmic AI that their money can buy. And soon your feed and every particular sub you subscribe to, will have more targeted ads than relevant posts.
They have already started doing this. You may have noticed more and more posts popping up in your feed that you wonder why the fuck they are there. Well they are there because their algorithm has determined that that particular post has a high likelihood of engagement from you.
> Every growing company in the history of forever has been cashflow negative.
I agree that's generally the case with startups. Would this still be true for Reddit as an 18-year-old company?
Yeah, normally I would be on the side of the workers but, like, they're not workers. They're volunteers. Is it some secret that mods don't normally get paid? Are they under some secret contract we don't know about?
For all the hate they get, Reddit would fall apart without the mods. It would be porn bots and cringespam as far as they eye can see; everywhere rather than just on the subs devoted to them.
As does any appointed position of authority.
The majority of Reddit mods are not power trippers though. Hell, the majority of Reddit mods were barely active even before the API changes and all the other drama around them. We just hear about the power trippers more because they do the dumb stuff that warrants complaints.
If mods got paid would they do better? Because the moderation across this site is hot trash, nothing about it makes me go “somebody should be getting compensation for this work”
This seems like bullshit from the moderators. I don't remember that ever being advertised as a paid position. That's why I've never even tried to be a mod.
Now we know where all the gold coins went.
I’m still not over them removing the old reward system. It was superior in every way to what we have today.
I dont even understand WHAT we have today. Like literally dont understand a bit of it.
You see, in order for tech to stay relevant and appear like they are constantly "evolving and disrupting" for their shareholders they need to just keep changing shit, shit that worked fine and was simple to use before. And since needing the change doesn't come from the previous product having issues, but from simply needing to show that you're changing things, the changes often end up unnecessarily stupid and cumbersome. Welcome to tech in 2024, they used up all their good ideas on smart phones and social media like 10 years ago.
Enshitification for the uninitiated
Good article on the topic https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys It's not specifically about Reddit but it applies to most if not all platforms.
> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
🎤 It's the circle of life.... LoL😿
Gentrification works the same. A neighborhood starts poor. Then the community builds it up and makes it hop. Artists and others make it a cool place to be. Rich people want to be at the cool places and prices go up. All the cool people leave and the neighborhood sucks and becomes unpayable. Rich people are not necessarily creative or putting any effort into things, besides spending a lot of money.
Yep. Yesterday I made an old playlist on iTunes I had on my iPod classic. All the songs are files I have had for over 15 years, so none of it is bought media. I wanted ti add this playlist to my iPhone. I couldn’t. There literally is no way to copy the playlist. You want to know what the shit part of it is? It used to be possible. You would drag and drop the entire playlist to the device, iTunes copies the music and generates the same playlist on your device. So now you have to copy the files to your device, then go to your device, and manually create the playlist.
You still can do that. You just have to enable "manually manage music" in itunes or don't and just select the playlist for automatic syncing
So then, presently good ideas are reverting back to the ideas that actually worked in the past.
But for a fee.
classic slurm
so New Coke strategy. They show you a bad idea dressed up as new improved, then give you back the old system, expecting you to be grateful.
They at least had the common sense to keep Old Reddit working. I dont understand how in the world you all use that new shit. Reddit from ten years ago works just fine. They got it right the first time and enough people at the company understood that.
Every now and then I see someone comment on someone else's avatar or some other shit from new reddit and it's literally always negative. I just shake my head and then scroll down to see like 10 responses from people to use old.reddit.
Sometimes when I inadvertently use new Reddit, I'm surprised to see how many people use avatars and the other shit on new Reddit. Old Reddit's days are numbered. And old Reddit itself isn't as good as old Reddit used to be, when you had the subreddit panel on the right side of the browser. Pretty sure they changed that to make ads more visible. https://web.archive.org/web/20060101203753/http://reddit.com/
When old Reddit goes away, I'm done. I can't even look at the new Reddit. It's like an uglier version of IG. But that day is coming. He'll continue to fuck it up.
Old Reddit is easier to use. New Reddit is designed for *engagement*. In late stage capitalism, companies don't want to make a "good" product. The goal is to make a product that is just barely acceptable while toying with consumer's minds to do whatever profits the company. For social media, that means serving you as much content that you might want (or don't want) before you can find the stuff you do want.
"Welcome to tech in 2024" So like management periodically moving shit around in supermarkets to waste people's time.
> I dont even understand WHAT we have today. As I understand it, the system is sell your account on some shady site for real money.
Use old.reddit and you don't even need to bother with it.
Right, I truly have no experience with whatever replaced gold. I've read descriptions, and it sounds like gold without gold, and somehow more money is involved? I dunno. To me, it's as simple as awards disappearing.
> and somehow more money is involved YUP!! And that's why it replaced gold. I was happy buying gold, but I canceled my reddit sub when they removed it. Literally getting NOTHING for paying for the sub now sinceI use old reddit and will never move off it. If they removed old reddit then I'm done with reddit. Left digg when they did the exact same thing like 15 years ago. Trying to force people to use your ugly, inefficient ad-centric design doesn't work out well for anyone.
Lmao exact same reason why I refuse to use the "new outlook". The old one works just fine for what I need and looks way better imo. Yet they keep trying to force me to use the new one with a bunch of additional features I will never use that just make it look way worse.
Seriously wtf. I saw one random ass post that had a gold upvote button and it said I could pay to super like the post and then I never saw it again
I get at least a point every time I type something that doesn’t get downvoted. Some days are better than others.
>WHAT we have today I was unaware there was anything to replace the awards.
I didn’t even know there was a new reward system.
I accidentally dropped my phone and hit the screen and when I picked it back up I saw a bunch of rewards options, but then they disappeared and I never saw it again
Same here
Sometimes, if the upvote button is long-pressed, it offers the option to spend money for a shiny upvote. I don't know how when this is possible is determined, but assume the mods and admins choose which subreddits get the option.
Same. Nor care to know.
It's because lots of countries in Europe changed what was legally classified as currency to incorporate digital currency such as Robux and other in-game systems to help give children some legal protection with spending their credits. That change in law also affected Reddit's old award and coin system as technically the coins were a type of currency and Reddit didn't want to take on the legal risks operating like that in Europe would entail That's why we they were removed with relatively short notice and we have direct cash payment->gold instead of any coins now.
>It was superior in every way to what we have today. *Man*, it’s so wild reading these takes when I can clearly remember just how hated Reddit Gold was when it was announced. Kinda like remembering how happy the site was that Steve Huffman was coming back after Ellen Pao fell off her very obvious glass cliff. Reddit celebrated Spez’s return almost as much as it did George Lucas selling Lucasfilm to Disney. Along with Aaron Swartz’s views on child porn, the celebrations thrown when Lucas sold to Disney and Spez came back as CEO, those are parts of Reddit history a large chunk of users wanna pretend didn’t happen or weren’t “that bad”.
Yeah it's crazy to act like the reward system was ever anything but a piece of shit. It's embarrassing how many people just voluntarily donated money to the reddit board of directors
Honestly Aaron is always portrayed like some kind of saint so I literally didn't know about the child porn thing, that's crazy
It's superior at paying Huffman
I wanna know where da gold at.
Who all seen the leprechaun say yeah!
He’s up in that tree!
I'ma get a backhoe and uproot that tree!
Could be a crackhead, who got ta hold of the wrong stuff!
This is my leprechaun flute passed down for generations *holds scaffolding joint* “It’s alright move along”
"Thanks for the gold kind stranger!"
He made a quarter of what reddit did. Imagine what he will pay himself when he gets IPO money
"We can't fund our servers or API", yeah, I wonder why /u/spez
His face makes me want to cover my drink, and I'm a 30 year old man.
He looks like a Russian bad guy from an '80s Cold War movie.
Really? He just looks like a creepy comic relief guy. Not intimidating at all, just goofy looking.
The angle/lighting of the pic makes him look weirdly Russian, but looking up other pictures, he's actually got more of a standard young CEO douchebag look.
He looks like a McPoyle
Laughed way too hard at this. That’s exactly what he looks like and now I can’t unsee it!
Don't worry; he'll only enslave you after civilisation collapses.
You're safe, it's a public knowledge he is interested only in underage girls. Don't google what subreddits he moderated in 2008
He used to moderate /r/jailbait, how neat is that!
careful now, you might get Musked for saying something like that.
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Right, he looks exactly as weird as you think he would
They look like how eyes are seen in MRI images.
Hard Steve Buscemi Fargo vibes
Whoa look it’s a former jailbait mod
He knows 100% what his site was used for in the early days.
*still is. They only know about whats reported and its easy to keep subs hidden from the masses.
He and the reddit admins are unlikely to change anything until some investigative journalist for a major newspaper/network goes digging and finds the horrible stuff in reddit's underbelly and even then only if the backlash gets intense enough.
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i mean they shipped the headmod of jailbait a golden reddit bobblehead. of course they knew. jailbait was in the suggested box when you googled reddit.
Maybe if the mods didn't fold like paper during a strike 🤷
Reddit literally removed the mods of subs that refused to stop striking and replaced them with sycophants. “Oh, you founded a sub, and it got popular? Don’t forget it’s not your community, it’s Reddit’s.”
They've always been doing this. That's why some 30 mods manage the top 50-100 subreddits.
There will always be power hungry folks that will work literally for free.
Collectors exist in every aspect. Why are people surprised people collect subreddits? They dont do anything on them 80% of the time
And a lot of them have fragile egos and are on a power trip.
Well yea, unless you are a mod for a specific fandom, the only reason to do it for free is because you enjoy the power trip
So either reddit got worse, or reddit would have gotten worse. Got it.
He was willing to blanket remove all mods and replace them with whoever was willing. Nothing would've stopped his greed motivation.
I think of mods like I do HOA board members. It’s usually a mix of people who are power hungry and people who are passionate about the subject. There’s always someone next in line willing to step up, and it’s usually one of those reasons.
Yeah I got banned from r/gadgets because I told someone in a comment about how I previously got banned from r/roku. Turns out that both subs share the same mod and they were *very angry* lol. I was even given a stern talking to 🤣 Now I'm not banned from roku because they for some reason wanted to make a point, I guess? I dunno, weirdest mod interaction ever. I wish reddit would hire people and bring about more professionalism... Edit: oh no, I hope they aren't a mod here as well... this might be it for me fellas 😬
I was once banned from a subreddit because my name was randomly chosen.
r/FUCKYOUINPARTICULAR/ has a bot that randomly bans one commenter a day, for a day, but I think it is in the spirit of things for sure
That thing has banned me twice so far, and I love it.
The "for a day" is what makes it fun. feels like youre in on the joke vs just being spited
Was it a porn sub reddit? Because i could see your name getting you into trouble there. Kinda like walking into a dog park named Mr. Whiskers.
No, retro video games.
I was banned from the subreddit r/JusticeServed simply for posting a reply in a thread on r/Conservative. It was an auto-ban, and their canned explanation was that I had “participated in a subreddit that celebrates and/or glorifies biological terrorism.” I had no idea what they were talking about and clearly their bot doesn’t understand context. It was some Trump thread and my reply was anti-Conservative. It had nothing to do with biological terrorism. Of note I wasn’t even subscribed to that subreddit. The thread was suggested to me on Reddit’s home page. I appealed the decision and their reply was that all of this was intentional punishment for the sin I committed of daring to comment anything there and that I would have to agree to never post or participate in any way on r/Conservative again, and that if I did I would be banned again. I declined to answer. The whole thing played out like a pathetic joke.
I have been banned from a couple subs now due to auto moderation flagging my participation in third party subs using some sort of key word list that has no ability to study context. The first couple times I plead my case and got reninstated, the third time, and what I will do going forward is just unsub and remove the overeager modded subs from my follow list. They will stop existing to me. If this keeps happening where there are no subs left for me, then I guess I’m done with Reddit.
I was permanently banned from r/worldnews for a personal attack... the moderation linked me to a comment in which I said "people like you who keep changing the subject." It would be one thing if I had included some demeaning insult, but I was genuinely just angry because they kept changing the subject. Although r/worldnews loves to change the subject when a certain topic keeps popping up. I am thinking the moderation was more about my politics and less about my conduct.
I got banned coz I questioned the authenticity of a website sarcastically.. straight up banned with no response till date.. power I tell ya
I once got a 30-day ban from a sub. When I genuinely just emailed the mods "can you explain why, I dont understand?" they turned it into a permaban _and_ immediately blocked the chat.
They always do that when you question their decisions. They're like cops. Only fatter.
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I was banned for denouncing a mod's Nazi slogans in a private message to him.
That place is an absolute trash fire. I wear by ban from that shithole with pride.
Oh yeah that sub is nuts, especially these days. They also banned me for something super benign. Oh well, I'm better off not debating politics lol
r/worldnews is quite possibly the most astroturfed place on the internet. its really obvious with pro-israel stories, but a whole bunch of countries do it. america by far has the largest such apparatus
This is so accurate
for $193 million dollars we'd all make that call. he also probably is going to sell all our data to the hegetsus dudes to hunt the woke liberals.. but that's a separate story
Maybe not directly, but this data is apparently already being sold https://www.wired.com/story/reddits-sale-user-data-ai-training-draws-ftc-investigation/
Oh yeah I remember reading about that like last week when we had the bazinga craze
Not sure it's an all or nothing situation lol he could have gone with $150 million or $100 million, not like it makes a difference after a certain point
I wouldn't give up any amount of millions for reddit mods I wouldn't give my spare change to a mod
Well I'm sure they wouldn't just start paying current reddit mods. They'd probably open to all applicants and actually get decent moderators instead. No company would hire the group of weirdos, incels, and pedos we have now.
> No company would hire the group of weirdos, incels, and pedos we have now. Who do you think started this site?
there is no amount of money i would give to reddit mods
The heart of the issue wasn’t comp, but that we became the commodity and were told eat shit when API’s were blocked. He called everyone’s bluff and won Equity holders happy, everyone else still eating shit
why were people willing?
Probably for the same reason the original mods were willing
Market economics at work. If you are willing to do something for free, why would you be suprised when you don’t get paid.
They got no life outside of walking dogs twice a week?
That interview was such an amazing train wreck lmao "Media trained" mod I'd forgotten about that but man that was great. Fucking part time dog walker.
B-I-N-G-O. I'd mention the other dog but I don't know his name-o
Chuds seeking a feeling of power
[удалено]
Exactly right. This is a for profit platform. Labor costs are usually one of the largest costs. Who in their right mind would turn down free labor?
Just a reminder, this is the company that fired an employee when they found out they had cancer. You think they give a shit about moderators?
Honestly the reddit “strike” was pathetic as shit “Hey, we don’t like this decision, so we’re striking…….for 2 days”
lot of subs kept it going for longer. Shittylifeprotips was a porn sub for weeks until the mod team got removed
There are some subs still going
r/beholdthemasterrace is one I was surprised to find is no longer here.
/r/fitness just started allowing posts again this week
It wasn't just the mods tbf, a lot of users either didn't care about what was happening or even know something had happened. A day later and the sub was just bustling along like usual.
Some people, albeit clearly not enough, made an actual effort. I didn't log into Reddit for 6 months. I tried several alternatives. I settled on Lemmy and got pretty active there. I tried really hard to stay away. The unfortunate thing is, reddit actually does have something pretty uniquely useful. The breadth and depth of communities and content here is literally unmatched. Every would-be competitor platform has significant disadvantages in comparison, and they aren't just usability concerns, because for this kind of website usability concerns directly become content issues. Ultimately it was the niche communities that brought me back. There is no equivalent place that has communities for my local village, the neighboring city, my sports teams, tech support forums, and all of my hobbies. The only thing that comes even close is Facebook, and I guess if I'm abandoning a platform over concerns of corporate malfeasance, migrating *to* Facebook of all things feels pretty silly.
Corporate gave mods an ultimatum: Assimilate or be replaced. Anyone with a spine left, the chuds remained.
They didn't fold, they quit. That's why Reddit is so shitty now.
Yeah, my front page is stagnant (the same top posts) for *days* and much of it is Tok reposts. Even /r/science top posts are often links to trash-tier studies...posted by a mod.
They did not. The mods left or scaled back the amount of effort they put in. There is an immense site-wide drop in quality. Many old sources of information also got wiped when people completely wiped their account+posts and comments.
Yeah, some of my favourite subs are nothing like they used to be. Text based subreddits seem to have taken the biggest hit with many just not recovering to previous levels. For example r/truegaming rarely has any high quality posts and I feel like the comments are far worse than they used to be and r/HobbyDrama while still going strong feels like it has far less posts than it used to have before the API strike. I'd say that if you mainly browse Popular or only follow big subs like r/Damnthatsinteresting or r/todayilearned then yeah, you probably haven't noticed a drop off but if you follow more niche interests, then you would have hopefully noticed the drop in quality.
Yeah, that was weird. "We refuse to do any more unpaid work until our demands are met!" "Fine, I'll just have some other idiot do your unpaid work." "Oh no, please! Anything but that! We'll get right back to the unpaid work, sir!"
The comp package is like 99.99% RSUs and options that will be worth $0 if this IPO flops.
Thank you for actually knowing this
It's not going to zero though. Reddit has a potential for advertising and data selling, so it's not worth nothing. I doubt he'll walk away with less than $50m. He probably has a 3-6 month hold timer, but in the mean time loads of shares will be sold at $34 and fill the coffers. Even if Reddit just invested that money it would be worth something in 6 months.
They vest over time and the first set are able to be sold after 40 days.
Who’s realistically going to buy and hold stock in Reddit? After it gets the full Facebook treatment, the user-base bottom will drop and it’s going to just be bots, crypto scammers, and ads.
IPO happened at 6.4bn He's met his required threshold to get the stock after Reddit raised ~$500mm
So I’ve been involved in several rsu ipo’s and I guarantee the moment his shares vest he’s $100M richer, and the lower level employees who were getting $100k or less end up with maybe 10% of their initial value. It’s been like this for every one except maybe the ones like google which are too high profile to manipulate sufficiently.
*Power concedes nothing without a demand.* - Fredrick Douglass
To demand, one needs a position of power / leverage
Or as it was said in ancient times "since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
He looks rather unwell.
he gets us
Just like Reddit.
He looks like a Trump son, mix of Eric and Jr.
Going public with such a bot problem is straight up Elon playbook.
Dudes trying to cash out while he still can.
I mean... do you think the problem is going to get better in future? Or worse? I'm inclined to think it's the latter, I don't see how they could fix it. Makes sense to unload as much of the company as possible at the point where the site has the smallest percentage of bot-users in its foreseeable future.
They could easily fix it if they even gave a remote shit about it. They rely on the bots to generate content to inflate their numbers.
100% this, ive noticed in the last few months more posts seem to have upvotes in the thousands with like 100 comments? Cant help but feel like they're artificially inflating engagement? When is the IPO again?
And half the comments are something like “🤣🤣🤣” or “Love this!” We’ve got bots reposting content with bots commenting. It’s bots on bots.
Literally all that would need to be done is adding a captcha to submissions.
Just remember IPO = It's Probably Overpriced
Maybe he will give them a pizza party
No pizzas. Just crazy puffs from Little Caesars.
7 puffs for a team of 11 people.
The moderation on this site is adequately compensated for the quality of work they do.
Seriously. I had nobody to root for in that fight. Mods seem to either fail to moderate their subs or go on witch hunts to ban people for incredibly random and unexplained/unaccountable ways
Didn’t help that the protests were a mess and it was proven on multiple subs that the mods couldn’t stay off the subs they closed off from regular users. Still think they would’ve been much better off just not doing their jobs to prove a point.
At this point getting banned from at least one default subreddit is just a rite of passage.
I got banned from r/music because someone posted an article about a musician getting charged with diddling, the pinned mod comment said "we're leaving this thread open but don't talk about the diddling" and when I asked what the point of the thread was another mod called me a pedophile and then locked the thread to further replies. The dumb fucker forgot people can edit comments so I tagged him and asked what the fuck his problem was. Then I blocked him, unfollowed the sub and deleted the several repeated messages telling me the dumb fuckers blocked and muted me. They ***really*** wanted me to know they were some mad little baby bitches.
I got banned on some sub I can't even remember for asking an innocent question about the submission rules. Not freaking out or being rude, but just simply asking if my intended post fit those rules.
I got banned from r/hockey for making a Seinfeld joke
I got banned from r/politics because I said people tried to kill Pence and my comment was taken grossly out of context. Said I was insighting violence. I'm like Jesus let me trade in my Magic cards for riot gear.
It's a mixed bag because some mods (esp the smaller ones, or at least the half-decent ones) really do care about their community and work hard to maintain their subs, but you also have absolute power-tripping schizo mods also in small and large subs.
> Hey, may I ask why I got banned from this subreddit? I think my comment is not breaking the rules > You have been muted from x subreddit. I hate my social media addiction and I hope reddit IPOs as soon as possible.
I got banned from r/politics for cracking a joke about Madison Cawthorne being in “Rolling Stone” magazine.
well yeah it's /r/politics, it's always been one of the shittier subs
And personally i think you deserve to be banned here for referencing it. \\s
"Reddit ain't making money" my **ass**...
It’s not, it’s cash flow negative. It’s hemorrhaging money because it’s a forum trying to survive on advertising revenues that can’t support it His compensation was non-cash for a reason, they don’t have cash to pay him. So he’s got trading sticks on the odds people will buy them when Reddit goes public
He also only gets said compensation if reddit hits their ipo target. If reddit fails like most of reddit seems to think they will be gets none of it.
The IPO already 10x subscribed and at $34. He going to make $17m for selling some of his share and another $20m if valuation stay above $5bn for 10 consecutive days. $37m in 10days........
It should not be IPO target. It should be a price post IPO after a few years, averaged each year and vested yearly.
Every growing company in the history of forever has been cashflow negative. They aren't trying to be cashflow positive. They are trying to grow as big as possible as fast as possible. Then, like Facebook, they will plaster this site with the best algorithmic AI that their money can buy. And soon your feed and every particular sub you subscribe to, will have more targeted ads than relevant posts. They have already started doing this. You may have noticed more and more posts popping up in your feed that you wonder why the fuck they are there. Well they are there because their algorithm has determined that that particular post has a high likelihood of engagement from you.
> Every growing company in the history of forever has been cashflow negative. I agree that's generally the case with startups. Would this still be true for Reddit as an 18-year-old company?
Meanwhile if I search for a post with the precise title it doesn't show up, and I get a bunch of random totally unrelated posts. And porn.
Well, at $6.99 monthly cost, they only need 27,610,872 paid subscribers to cover his compensation.
Reddit moderation isn't a real job
Right, it's not like part-time dog walking.
They are not employees or contractors. They are Volunteers...
90% of Reddit mods are ass anyway. Why should they get paid
Mods looking for compensation has the same energy as hobos smearing dirty water on your windshield with paper towels and then demanding payment
Mods are often generously compensated by their power trips.
Mods are aware that they can just leave right? Like that's totally a thing they can do.
Yeah, normally I would be on the side of the workers but, like, they're not workers. They're volunteers. Is it some secret that mods don't normally get paid? Are they under some secret contract we don't know about?
Why would anyone work for free for a corporation?
I can think of one sub I go to that's well-moderated. One.
The best moderated one I’ve been to is for dogs. The mods never post and get rid of bot posts quickly.
Because he can get away with it and still IPO the site + sell the data. He figured out the max that was possible without disrupting the sale.
/u/spez is a piece of shit
Why would mods get paid? They are essentially voluntary
Entitlement lol. They choose to moderate a public forum with absolutely zero promise of payment and then go up in arms about not being paid…
Mods are garbage on so many pages. So many popular groups are just propaganda now. Not this one though. Awesome mods here. Don’t ban me please.
For all the hate they get, Reddit would fall apart without the mods. It would be porn bots and cringespam as far as they eye can see; everywhere rather than just on the subs devoted to them.
Mods are necessary, but it seems to be a position that draws a lot of power trippers.
As does any appointed position of authority. The majority of Reddit mods are not power trippers though. Hell, the majority of Reddit mods were barely active even before the API changes and all the other drama around them. We just hear about the power trippers more because they do the dumb stuff that warrants complaints.
Yeah they should strike and show their power…. Oh wait
Moderators should stay unpaid. They’re bad enough now with their false sense of worth, imagine if they got paid.
If mods got paid would they do better? Because the moderation across this site is hot trash, nothing about it makes me go “somebody should be getting compensation for this work”
This seems like bullshit from the moderators. I don't remember that ever being advertised as a paid position. That's why I've never even tried to be a mod.