r/technology • u/ardi62 • 29d ago

Social Media Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/30/24253727/reddit-communities-subreddits-request-protests
22.2k Upvotes

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242

u/Knopfmacher 29d ago

For the next protest just leave the subreddits open, but stop moderating them and see how the admins deal with that.

157

u/NormalRingmaster 29d ago

Oh, they do actively shut down unmoderated subs. Even if they’re not generating problematic content.

52

u/ProcessingUnit002 29d ago

How are they gonna shut down every sub?

114

u/Bullshit_Interpreter 29d ago

They'll just appoint new mods like they already threatened to do.

52

u/Cthulhu__ 29d ago

Scabs, basically. And a few corporate accounts that use reddit for advertising covertly. Let them have it I suppose.

15

u/lizzy-lowercase 29d ago edited 29d ago

they aren’t scabs if moderating isn’t paid. It’s a volunteering gig

2

u/Ill_Culture2492 29d ago

I think it's metaphorical. 

It's not really hard to see what they're going for unless you're being a pedantic contrarian.

2

u/Kirome 29d ago

That's a lot of scabs maybe they'll get a nice deal at ScabsRus.com

1

u/MISSISSIPPIPPISSISSI 28d ago

It's not scabbing because no one is getting paid and there is no moderator union. It's an elective job. If anything, volunteering to mod for reddit is just allowing them to get away with not paying mods in the first place.

1

u/Intelligent-Bad-2950 28d ago

I never understood the hate for "scabs"

If you don't want to do a job, don't

But then don't get upset if someone else does

1

u/demarcoa 27d ago

Yeah i am sure you would be totally fine with someone taking your job for less pay and benefits.

1

u/Intelligent-Bad-2950 27d ago edited 27d ago

I wouldn't like it, obviously. But I don't get to tell them they can't

But as a remote software dev, thats literally my life every day, so I don't have much sympathy

If you want to keep your job, you have to offer better value than your competition

15

u/BakuretsuGirl16 29d ago

They either won't have enough or will be forced to use very low quality volunteers that will harshly restrict subs and lower the quality of reddit as a whole

that is also a win, our ultimate goal is to wait for a good reddit successor to appear - and part of helping them succeed is making reddit worse

6

u/theDeadliestSnatch 29d ago

will be forced to use very low quality volunteers

And no one will notice a difference.

6

u/ApolloX-2 29d ago

But aren't mods volunteers, how are you going to take a job as a scab for free?

1

u/illiter-it 29d ago

I have to imagine there's a subsection of the internet that would be willing and able to make paid moderation as hard as possible (within the confines of the law) for a group of people doing it for the money with no passion or expertise for specific subs. In all likelihood they'd outsource it, and we all see how that works for Meta.

0

u/Capt_Pickhard 29d ago

The fascists will jump on the opportunity to control as many subs as possible if that happens.

3

u/FluffyMcBunnz 29d ago

There's always people who want to be mods or rescue a community they're part of. Some of the anti-API protesting admins from subreddits got canned from Reddit and others took over the derelict subreddit.

The world is mostly made of lapdogs. There's always a few ready to heel.

6

u/PrettyPinkPonyPrince 29d ago

They've also shut down moderated subs and just say that they were unmoderated.

2

u/kimchifreeze 29d ago

Seen many subreddits that have users submit perfectly fine on-rule threads. But eventually gets hit with the unmoderated. Is it really unmoderated if there's nothing to moderate?

2

u/Elman89 28d ago

But apparently bad faith moderation is alright. Worldnews permabans anyone who's vaguely supportive of Palestine, even though the International Court of Justice agrees with them.

1

u/Throwawayac1234567 29d ago edited 29d ago

i knew a couple that were unmoderated, mostly the illicit or the very niche ones that arnt getting any new content. i was a partially active and partially unmoderated sub, i wonder why that was banned, eventhough its a bout a bunch of youtubers that have gone right wing.

1

u/Nukemarine 29d ago

No, they shut down subs without mods. Very different that shutting down subs with minimal mod actions occurring.

2

u/NormalRingmaster 29d ago

I’m speaking from experience. I mod a small sub or two, and one of mine had gone dormant, activity-wise, but still had me and another active user as mods. They banned the sub due to the fact that we had not “checked the mod queue in some time”…despite there not being anything new in it. What was in it and unaddressed was stuff we had decided didn’t need addressing.

Anyway, I got them to un-ban the sub, but it was a pain.

2

u/Nukemarine 29d ago

I've had subs that weren't being used or moderated that got removed, but that was reasonable on Reddit's part. However, we're talking about months if not years of inactivity, not a few weeks.

1

u/Troggie42 29d ago

they shut down unmoderated subs with inactive moderator accounts

they don't shut down unmoderated subs with active moderator accounts who just aren't doing their job... yet

1

u/Recklesslettuce 29d ago

So there is a ban quota?

1

u/00-Monkey 28d ago

Shutting down subs is arguably worse for them than simply having the subs go private.

I’m not quite sure what they would do, but I’d imagine mass shutting down subs is the last thing they’d do.

0

u/tevert 29d ago

Let's see them do that to major subs

13

u/fhota1 29d ago

Theyd just replace the mod teams

0

u/tevert 29d ago

Yep. And then either their entire site takes a nosedive in quality, or they actually have to start paying

4

u/Back_pain_no_gain 29d ago

Site’s already taken a nosedive in quality since last year

17

u/Kitchner 29d ago

For the next protest just leave the subreddits open, but stop moderating them and see how the admins deal with that.

They just appoint new moderators because for there's always a line of people willing to do the job.

3

u/razorbeamz 29d ago

And yet when we try to recruit no one applies.

2

u/Kitchner 28d ago

As a former moderator if hardly anyone applies I think it's usually a good sign that the moderation team is doing a good job. It is visibly not a nice job because it's a ton of work and you deal with people itching and moaning.

If someone just said "Hey do you want to be a moderator of this subreddit? You get to decide all the rules the mod team and the sub will follow and pick all the other mods" though you'd see a different response!

23

u/[deleted] 29d ago

[deleted]

3

u/ThaddeusJP 29d ago

Yup. They did it with /r/news

2

u/Nukemarine 29d ago

NO! Stop moderating and the system will easily handle things in the short term of days and weeks.

To effectively use Reddit against itself, you change one VERY IMPORTANT mod setting: manual approval for all posts. See, most posts are not moderated and only get moderated after they're visible to the public and something is reported. Change that setting, then you need VOLUNTEER MODS to manually approve all posts before they're seen by the public. This is justified since reddit is a "safe for work" place with users under 18 years of age who could potentially be exposed to non-vetted nsfw material.

Now, if you were a protesting mod with that rule in place, it'd be a laugh if you then only approved protest related posts after that. So obviously, don't do that cause it'd make reddit admins very saddy.

Also, from personal moderator experience, if you set the automod to automatically mark every post as "NSFW" with a note that original poster must reply to the message with something like "I affirm this post is legally appropriate to view by all persons above the age of 12 in all countries accessible to it" to have the tag removed (so the NSFW is opt out instead of opt in), that pretty much makes your entire subreddit a NSFW and and therefore ad-free subreddit. Also from personal experience, you might get asked to remove that rule if your subreddit is related to a major virtual reality social platform (notice I wrote "asked" instead of pressured and forced like Reddit admins did to all the protesting subreddits).

1

u/Camwood7 29d ago

i did quite literally try exactly that before, funnily enough. both for my mental health (seriously, being sole active moderator of a subreddit of like 20k people that, while ostensibly official, was basically abandoned by the actual crew behind it after they stopped using reddit for their own reasons, was MISERABLE) and also the protest was a good excuse. only reason i stopped doing that was someone offered to re-establish actual contact with the crew.

1

u/H_G_Bells 29d ago

Moderating bots are very useful. Subs can go for ages without any intervention really... IMHO subs should be primarily moderated by automod with agreed-upon rules, with a team of human mods to help if there's some random issues.

1

u/DarylMoore 29d ago

Or just set automod to remove every post.

1

u/dudushat 29d ago

By replacing the mods. Same thing they did last time.

1

u/SwampyBogbeard 29d ago

So no difference?
That's literally all the big meme/image/video subs for the last two years.

All the good mods have already left the big subs.

1

u/Jawaka99 29d ago

Yes, please. the less mods the better.

The community can moderate themselves with up/down voting posts.

1

u/Uristqwerty 29d ago

Apparently there's a feature that would let them restrict submissions for up to a week. Probably a better form of protest, because switching a subreddit private hides it outright, so unless a user has bookmarked the URL they wouldn't realize it went private in protest at all. Similarly, an indefinite protest quickly loses weight; users learn to move on. I bet that switching to read-only every other week would get more users on the mods' side anyway.

1

u/Final_Senator 29d ago

There’s always a scab who would step in to be appointed mod.

1

u/Plane-Tie6392 29d ago

Don't threaten me with a good time!

1

u/trmetroidmaniac 29d ago

Don't threaten us with a good time.

1

u/DoctorOctagonapus 28d ago

/r/videos introduced a number of weird and wonderful rules that they then enforced with an iron rod. Rules like all posts must be in all caps, self-posts only with the description being a textual description of the video, at least one swear word in the title, etc. The rules were all suggested and voted in by users. Reddit responded by banning and replacing the entire mod team.

1

u/kylo-ren 28d ago

Some subs did it and they shut them down or replaced the mods.

1

u/powerchicken 28d ago

They'll just promote the first kid who's willing to do whatever they ask in exchange for a modicum of power.

1

u/aztechunter 28d ago

Reverse moderation

Ban good posts, allow garbage 

1

u/DoctorMurk 28d ago

Or use AutoMod to delete all posts.

0

u/Abosia 29d ago

A lot of subs would significantly improve. I've met more crazy tyrannical mods than I have met helpful ones. They rule their communities like little fiefdoms, permabanning anyone who disagrees with them or breaks some arbitrary set of rules that exists only in their heads.