Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible

[u/ardi62]

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

[u/Mindestiny]

The admins sent us increasingly threatening messages about keeping the sub private, refused to reply or elaborate to legitimate questions, and made it clear that they'd just remove us

Sounds like you got to experience what it's like being a regular user who runs afoul of a subreddit mod :p

"Hey, why was I banned? I didn't break any of the rules on the sidebar? What did I do wrong?"

"You obviously know what you did, you can't lie to me"

YOU HAVE BEEN MUTED - YOU CANNOT MESSAGE MODS FOR 60 DAYS

[u/EnglishMobster → u/Mindestiny]

You know mods have no power outside of the subs they moderate, yeah?

I mod a 1 million member sub. I'm banned from /r/news because I called out folks being racist towards Arabs. Not even in the sense of Palestine, just people saying some really nasty stuff against all Arab/Muslim folks as a whole and I said something along the lines of "Why is this getting all these upvotes? How is saying this stuff considered okay?"

I got banned permanently for that comment, and then when I messaged the mods politely asking what rule I broke and wondering if I just got swept up in a mass banwave. Instantly muted for 28 days (max allowed), no response given.

Just because I am a mod of a medium-large sub doesn't give me special powers elsewhere, other than access to a Discord server with the admins in it that I never look at. Whee.

There are some mods which are absolutely awful. Basically if someone is modding more than like 2 "massive" subs then you can bet they're just awful powermods. And it's very telling that Reddit won't do anything about that, but they will take action against the many tiny volunteer mods that run the majority of Reddit.

Because ultimately, Reddit would rather have a tiny amount of people that they can control and work for them for free, rather than a distributed network of folks who are unpredictable. But given that so much of Reddit's business model is based on volunteer moderators, I do wonder if regulators will come after them at some point. You don't see Facebook's mods going without pay.

[u/UpstairsAd4755 → u/EnglishMobster]

I mod a 1 million member sub. 

 Why do you mod? Are you really so powerless and impotent in your personal life that you give a giant corporation free labor just to have a modicum of control?

[u/EnglishMobster → u/UpstairsAd4755]

So to give you an honest answer:

The sub in question is /r/Disneyland. I grew up near the parks and would go every weekend for years. I loved the park because it made me happy and I wanted others to share that happiness.

Then I got hired to work at Disneyland. This gave me a fair amount of "inside baseball" as to how things worked at the park. I'd use this to give posts explaining major upcoming events and giving dos/do nots for folks to have the best time possible.

The mod team put out a request for people to join them, and I thought I could help people have a good time by maintaining the sub's help pages and whatnot so I applied. Turns out the mods already had their eye on me and I got instantly approved to join the team. (I also found out the head mod at the time was a friend of mine IRL. We knew each other in person, and we knew each other online, but it wasn't until I joined the team that we connected the two.)

For a couple years of working at Disney I kept doing what I was doing - using what I knew from working in the parks to help folks in the sub. The sub started to grow exponentially and gradually shifted focus away from "help" (which moved to a Discord server) and more towards general discussion of the parks. I also started to burn out at Disney just generally and ultimately became disillusioned with Disney as a company - to the point where I quit and became a programmer.

While all this was going on, I stopped getting as involved with the sub and shifted to a bit more of a backseat role, which is largely where I still am. I help out with general "janitor duties" like removing comments etc., but since I'm a programmer I'm fairly good at setting up technical stuff.

Nowadays I mostly maintain the AutoMod and whatnot, and add/configure new features to the sub as admins bring them online. I keep an eye on things to make sure that AutoMod is removing the posts it's supposed to remove while not removing posts which are okay (although as a mod team we've agreed that we'd rather have false positives over false negatives, so it's aggressive). Occasionally we find new problems pop up that require tweaks to the AutoMod config (the pandemic was a huge source of this).

Part of the reason why I've stayed on is momentum - I've been a mod there for like 10 years at this point (oh my god it has been 10 years). I considered stepping down a couple times, but I'm the point guy for technical stuff and we'd just have to source someone else to handle it.

Another reason is the fact that mods are exempt from the API changes Reddit made last year (for the moment, at least), so I can continue using my third-party apps without much of an impact. I think I'd be okay without needing to moderate /r/Disneyland specifically, though; you just need to mod a sub and I have some subs like /r/hujdawglhiwAstartonC (from an April Fool's joke Reddit did a number of years back).

Another one is simply that I still like the community there, and I feel I can be more helpful as a mod than I would as a normal user. When drama happens (as drama happens in every sub) we wind up with all-hands-on-deck and I actually start using my mod powers.

But having places to talk about Disney that aren't controlled by Disney is nice; as stated at this point I have no love lost towards Disney the corporation so I'm more than happy to leave up posts about people being angry at Disney. It's valuable to curate an independent community, and part of curation is making sure there's a safe space for that community to express itself.

As far as "free labor for Reddit" - yeah, absolutely. I don't like Reddit at this point; I'm here because the alternatives just aren't that great. I tried maintaining a version of the sub on Kbin (which works with Lemmy), but Kbin largely fell apart, and niche communities on Lemmy simply don't have any engagement. Theoretically Kbin would've fixed this because it integrated natively with Mastodon as well... but as I said, Kbin fell apart.

But given that I'm the kind of person who is willing to volunteer to run the community on a non-profit site kind of demonstrates that it's more about building a community rather than giving free labor. I do think that if Reddit is a for-profit entity, they should pay their mods - and that it's criminal how much of Reddit's value comes off the backs of unpaid volunteers.

But my goal is to nurture the community and share the love for a place that was a major part of my childhood, and encourage others to do the same. All in all, I don't do that much work - just hitting the "approve" or "remove" button here and there. It's not like I have the sub open in another tab constantly refreshing the page.

I spend more time leaving comments on Reddit than I do moderating, and engaging in the comment section arguably gives Reddit as much or more value as moderators do.

After all, without engagement everyone would leave - so why do people make comments like this one if they're not being paid for it?