Reddit demands moderators remove NSFW labels, or else
Reddit demands moderators remove NSFW labels, or else
Reddit decides if a community is NSFW — not the moderators.
Article by The Verge, providing details about various subreddits and their mods getting threatened because they are labeled as NSFW
this fucking sucks. i am very disappointed that the protests lost steam and everything is just back to normal, swept under the rug. they showed their hand, acted like fucking dictators, and everyone is just like "welp thats it!" and gives the fuck up. it's just sad. it feels like 90% of the people who said they were in this were all just being performative.
so many of us dedicated a lot of time to the protests, left our communities, migrated, all for everyone to just go crawling back. i won't go back. i am staying on kbin. but man, it fucking sucks to see reddit face 0 consequences because Spez was right, "this will blow over"
I think this has done damage to Reddit, but it'll be death by a thousand cuts rather than a big instantaneous failure.
To be honest, I really don't care what happens to Reddit at this point. I'd rather have Kbin be a smaller, more dedicated community than have it "kill Reddit".
You get used to it. Change is slow and a website like reddit won't die overnight. Much better and productive to focus on building up a new community than tearing down the old.
The goal here shouldn't have been to kill reddit. The goal is to start fostering the next community for the inevitable next meltdown. Start the fire, not set the toen ablaze. Which I feel is a when, not if.
I'm betting before the end of the year they start to make a big hit on sexual content on reddit. THAT is going to make the fire really rise.
Let's be real, Joe Public doesn't care about the changes that caused the protests. They just want somewhere to go to see content, and reddits algorithms serve them content. If they have to scroll past some apps on a less-than-ideal app or the regular website, so be it. Most of the internet is shit anyways, reddits clients aren't much better or worse in that regard.
It's introduced a lot of people to the fediverse, which is awesome. And will probably have done a non-zero amount of damage to Reddit. But it'll survive so long as Joe Public is willing to put up with it to see their cat pictures.
Yet this little hidden gem rests at the bottom of the page after the article.
Volunteer-made project that fights bots on Reddit is shutting down
Grab some popcorn, the bots are coming.
I was just going to say this. Holding on to the illusion of power as a major moderator is about to turn into a shitshow. Even Reddit themselves have been caught using chat bots to sway public opinion.
Reddit has decided to make every bad decision (favoring profits) possible, all at once.
This feels a bit like Reddit is that city planning guy who insists on opening the Ghost Containment Unit in Ghostbusters.
But Reddit does have a dick: its CEO.
Peck was a part of the EPA and had legitimate reasons to investigate them.
Venkman was a dick and didn't cooperate with Peck's investigation, so Peck got pissed and went nuclear on their ass cause he thought they were charlatans.
The guy who actually flipped the switch even told Peck he's never seen anything like that and didn't want to do it.
I really wonder about bot synergy. How many haiku's will one not write that another will correct the spelling on and a third find that all words are in alphabetical order?
Then another bot will repost the original and start the cycle over again.
Please come to lemmy, we will need BotDefende pretty soon.
As a biological language model, I disagree.
Adding more porn would fix this
The Verges coverage of this has actually been really good. Most other media outlets that have covered it at all have had 1 or 2 that demonstrated a superficial understanding of the conflict.
The verge has been regularly keeping up with what’s going on and seem to have a pretty good grasp on the issues.
"the mods decided to revert the NSFW designation because the community is a helpful resource for veterans experiencing mental health crises. The mod said that if Reddit removed the team, it could put the community at risk."
Bitch fudging please.
Please tell me again how these people are not power tripping their eyes out.
Imagine having no Reddit community to fall back on or having different mods into your community.. The horror!
Can these people;
- Stop acting as if they really want change to happen.
- Just start to bent over further for Reddit.
- Get on with their life.
- Admit that they really like their little power trip.
Permanently Deleted
You're in RedditMigration...
Reddit forgets just how well this move went for Tumblr.
Mods bend the knee the moment they have their power trip threatened
It's not really a power trip for some mods. Community and support are things some people REALLY need, especially veterans and disabled people. Would you say the same if the Mods of r/blind capitulated as well? They are blind people modding for other blind people, having random Reddit mods step into their job doesn't make sense and will hurt the community.
Ik a lot of mods do power trip, but you're just being a cynical ass because you want to feel superior for having left the website when I reality you're just another person with another opinion. Nothing special
Community and support are things some people REALLY need, especially veterans and disabled people. Would you say the same if the Mods of r/blind capitulated as well
Probably. I've been told for years to touch grass anytime I talk about issues important to me. But there are no local communities for my issues compared to veterans and the disabled. Maybe they should use that time to make actual connections.
you're just being a cynical ass because you want to feel superior for having left the website when I reality you're just another person with another opinion. Nothing special
People can do what they want. I was the same way in 2015. I just hope they open their eyes one day and realize that it's best to let go when you're disrespected for years on end. You have more power than these corporations want you to think.
Would also like to add that even if they did step down, it might cause issues.
For a good deal of subs, I imagine a mod team opening and promoting a Fediverse equivalent, and totally dropping the Reddit community would be fine. Move to the Fediverse, or deal with spamming and random trolls from potentially inactive new mods or the community being led in a strange (possibly hateful) direction from active new mods. Or just stop looking at the Reddit community entirely. Although it’s still possible these mods stay because they want to prevent people from having their day ruined by inactive new mods allowing some surprise NSFL gore on a very SFW sub.
For other ones, like r/lgbtq, this suddenly doesn’t seem like such a great choice to force on people. I acknowledge targeted harassment might still happen outside of r/lgbtq, but if I wanted to be homophobic, I’d seek out people on the subreddit for gay people. It probably gets more of it than the average sub. And there’s an expectation of that sub being safe from harassment in a world where many of its users expect harassment in most other spaces. Do you want to leave these users out in the cold if you pack it up for good and abandon Reddit modding? It’s possible your new replacements might also remove harassment and homophobia and transphobia, but I think it’s more likely they’ll do nothing. It’s also possible some homophobe signs up to mod it and starts posting homophobic trash. Do you want to subject people to this if they don’t move accounts? Most people would probably choose leaving at least one person from the current mod team to prevent just that.
Also, the potential of getting less activity on the Fediverse might actually matter. Say 1% of people browsing a support sub will give needed help. If 100 people would see the post on Reddit, but then you migrated to the Fediverse and now only 30 people see each post, posters have a smaller chance of getting the help they need.
Maybe mods of stuff like r/aww won’t cause too much damage to their users by jumping ship and leaving Reddit, having to quit looking at cute pictures because now it’s being spammed isn’t really the end of the world. Mods of support communities could do more damage if they quit. Not getting the money for your insulin could be the end of your world. Popping into r/lgbtq after receiving hate in real life from loved ones, expecting to find community support for your struggles only to get hate speech on your feed and your post, could help push you along to ending your world a lot faster.
Fully aware that a similar situation could happen on r/aww too. Could be the one bright spot in someone’s day, they go there after receiving hate from loved ones, now there’s NSFL gore of a guy killed for being gay with the title “[insert slur here] gets what’s coming to them,” could help push them along to ending their world a lot faster. I think this kind of case is probably closer to “edge case” than “would probably happen frequently if mods left,” but it’s probably still present in the minds of some mod teams who didn’t totally step down yet.
I don’t moderate anything.
Quotes taken from https://maya.land/monologues/2023/07/01/spez-feudalism-reddit.html
Imagine starting [a subreddit], hyping it up, patiently providing four-fifths of the content until people show up, moderating spam, moderating jerks, growing it gradually over time. Setting rules, establishing tone, running the weekly topical threads. Would you feel like that /r/whateverItWas existed because of Reddit the company? Would you feel like it fundamentally belonged to his Royal Highness Steve, and Steve was just delegating it to you to run? No! You started it! You shaped it! You collaborated with the people it attracted to make it what it is! Even those users – they could switch tomorrow to /r/whateverItWasTwo and you couldn’t do a thing about it – if they decided they didn’t like your vision for /r/whateverItWas, they would, so the fact that they’re still here is a kind of voting with your feet, it validates what you’re doing… To the extent that /r/whateverItWas exists as a thing within Reddit as a whole, to be run or misrun, managed or mismanaged? It feels like yours.
But at the same time, to an external observer – you can see how they would feel that this is pretty silly, right? The thing that’s “yours” is nothing but rows and columns in Reddit’s databases13, a series of flags giving you the power to moderate. The only thing you have is set in Reddit’s systems, a permission to edit stuff under a certain scope a bit differently than other users, wowee aren’t you important. It’s not you who has a license to the user posts, it’s not you who controls anything but a tiny little square of grass Reddit let you mow. You’re gonna protest over that? The world at large already doesn’t understand why you might volunteer for this work, why you might care enough to do it unpaid – you seem like a schmuck to them, a victim.
or a power tripper.
I’ll admit that some mods probably are on a power trip. A clear example of “probably not, they have an actual reason to want to stay in power” is r/askhistorians, where you probably don’t want random people replacing people with lots of historical knowledge on a subreddit specifically about history that only allows informative replies complete with a works cited. They care about the online space they’ve built, not that they have a ban hammer and can wield it with prejudice. I’d imagine a lot of other mods are pretty similar. Knowledge about their niche community, though probably not as much as the people on r/askhistorians, a certain subreddit culture that they don’t want to collapse and fall apart… they’d rather preserve the online space they and many other people enjoy. Even if it just looks like free labor and power tripping to outsiders whenever they don’t want to just up and abandon Reddit.
Yeah, as someone who modded for several years, there were two insults people loved to throw at us: Either we were power tripping or we were janitors who didn't matter.
Either of these were used whenever we enforced the rules of our community and kicked out people who didn't want to play nice with the rest of it. Of course, they will never have a positive opinion of people who enforce a community's rules.And that's the thing: The community. You do not spend several years modding a subreddit without getting to know the people and having some sort of relationship with them. The community is not an abstract, it's people you get to know - often over several years - and that's not something you want to leave behind.
"And that’s the thing: The community. You do not spend several years modding a subreddit without getting to know the people and having some sort of relationship with them. The community is not an abstract, it’s people you get to know - often over several years - and that’s not something you want to leave behind."
Who is asking them to leave it all behind?
The only way you can be part of a community is by being a mod?
If mods are feeling as wronged by Reddit as how they say they feel, why not resign as a mod and just join the community as a member?
I mean you would still be part of the community you say they hold so dear but in a different capacity.
It’s the worst threat ever, do what we tell you or we won’t let your work for free anymore!
The sad thing is that it's working. Pics and military reverted after the threat according to the article.