Reddit Ousted Mods After Subreddits Filled With Porn To Protest API Pricing Sche...
source link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/06/21/213225/reddit-ousted-mods-after-subreddits-filled-with-porn-to-protest-api-pricing-scheme
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Reddit Ousted Mods After Subreddits Filled With Porn To Protest API Pricing Scheme
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Various Reddit moderators reached out to Ars Technica this week, informing us that mods for r/Celebrities, r/InterestInGasFuck_, r/mildlyinteresting, r/self, r/ShittyLifeProTips, and r/TIHI have been removed. Other subreddits are reportedly affected, too, including r/toyota, r/garmin, and r/IllegalLifeProTips. All of the communities recently started allowing NSFW content as a form of API pricing protest. Reddit can't sell ads on NSFW content, and Redditors have accused the company of covertly switching some subreddits back to SFW.
As of this writing, some of the subreddits whose mods were removed remain unmoderated. Other subreddits have new mods. One example, r/Celebrities, has already seen resistance from community members, claiming the new mods "don't represent" them and that these mods weren't active in the community before the protests. Meanwhile, the feeling around the general mod community is one of disgust, while some are seriously considering abandoning their volunteer posts or have already done so. "We put up with a lot as Reddit mods—death threats, doxing, sorting through lewd and even illegal material (that Reddit continually ignores)—and deserve to be treated with basic respect," a Reddit moderator, who asked to be referred to only as Jess for privacy reasons, said regarding the removal of some mods. The mod has started erasing their account and has resigned as a moderator. "I have no desire to be associated with a company that conducts itself in such a manner," Jess said. Confusingly, the moderators of some of the subreddits, including r/mildlyinteresting, were restored. Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt said in a statement: "It's not OK to show people NSFW content when they don't want to see it. In line with our Moderator Code of Conduct, we'll remove moderators and restrict communities where moderators are engaging in malicious conduct, like allowing rule-violating behavior or encouraging the submission of sexually explicit content in previously safe-for-work spaces."
He added that mods "incorrectly marking a community as NSFW is a violation of both our Content Policy and Moderator Code of Conduct."
Ars notes that replacing Reddit moderators isn't so simple. "The free work Reddit moderators do has been valued at $3.4 million annually, and as detailed on the r/hentai subreddit, the work mods do is both complex and extensive," reports Ars. "Reddit itself calculated that manual mod removals represented 30.9 percent of content removed in 2022. Reddit would be a different website, one perhaps incapable of functioning, without the tens of thousands of volunteers it uses to keep content safe, enjoyable, relevant, and valuable. Relying on volunteers saves the unprofitable company plenty of money."
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They're trying to figure out how much they can get away with before people bail on them.
At any rate Reddit's not backing down. This is about selling user data to AI firms and other big data companies. They have to lock the API down if they're gonna charge for it, and there's a *ton* of money to be made (or they think there is) selling all that juicy user data.
It's the enshitification of the internet, where services are made available, owners want to do an IPO and cash out for fat sacks of cash, but investors aren't going to settle for a bit of profit, so you need to monetize user data and engagement in increasingly nasty was.
Facebook got it down to a science and now every website copies them. Everybody jonesing to be the next Zuckerberg billionaire.
Me? I say when you get to say, $100 million net worth you're banned from earning any more money or owning anything else. Instead you get a little trophy that says "you won capitalism".
And yeah, I stole that idea, but hey, that's capitalism right? I'm well on my way to that trophy!-
There's only going to be a ton of money to be made from it if there's a ton of data to siphon. And there is only going to be a ton of data to siphon if there's a lot of users, and whether there are a lot of users will depend on the quality of moderation, or, rather, on whether the moderation is to the liking of the users (that's not the same believe it or not).
The value of Reddit is in the eyeballs it gets. Now, those eyeballs are not directly tied to the mods, some would say a lot of moderation is actually
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This is what most people still "protesting" on Reddit fail to admit to themselves. What Reddit is doing isn't nice, it's business.
I definitely left for greener pastures, as the old saying goes, but I believe Reddit has probably done their due diligence and knows a large chunk of the site literally doesn't give a shit and just wants to be able to look at cute animal photos and videos. When I last looked, it seemed like they've gained 40% of their current userbase after the site redesign in 2017. Most o-
This is what most people still "protesting" on Reddit fail to admit to themselves. What Reddit is doing isn't nice, it's business.
That may be so, but Reddit was pretty much born out of Digg making the same exact same mistake. Digg within a space of months went from *the* news-forum site on the net to a dying husk of a site because their bungled attempts at screwing with the site and refusal to acknowledge that the the site was being flooded with commercial and political interests trying to game the system w
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The value of Reddit is in the eyeballs it gets. Now, those eyeballs are not directly tied to the mods, some would say a lot of moderation is actually detrimental to getting eyeballs (and I would be in that group), but then again, I'm one person, not the mass that the investors want. The problem here is, though, that the former mods already drove people like me away and I sure as all hell won't return. Unless the new mods work the same way the old ones did, they might lose another load of users.
No, the value
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Not to invested.
You've made the mistake of confusing the users with the customers. They are the product.
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That's the value it has to you.
But since you don't pay for that, you don't count.
What counts is the money your interest generates.
And that money comes from someone else.
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Not remotely. People landing on Reddit after Googling a problem are a tiny minority compared to the half a billion active monthly users who engage in conversation on a platform.
If anything Reddit's information is partially worthless for anything that isn't a) highly specific that a Google search can unambiguously direct you correctly to the problem, or b) so common that there's a weekly thread on it.
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The old data on Reddit is the valuable stuff. Because it's going to be free of LLM generated content. You only get to scrape the internet for your LLMs exactly one time. After that, it starts being tainted by content generated by LLMs. And if a LLM ingests content made by another LLM it starts getting high on its own supply. Or a better description would be it's like a prion disease. It's only a problem if you start feeding cow brains to cows. And then everybody gets Mad Cow [wikipedia.org] and goes insane.
Keeping the dat
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If you look at the tax codes before Reagan took office, that's basically what the Feds said. Although it was a higher number, anything above I think 500k was taxed anywhere from 75-95%
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Income tax doesn't stop the problem of generational wealth concentration. Our economic system is a game of Monopoly - the more you have, the more easily you accumulate more, and it snowballs.
We need a wealth tax so that staying wealthy means continual work to do so. Wealth should not be able to generate wealth on its own to the point someone can make enough to have them and their entire family live off investment income for generations.
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a simple model of how the rich get richer and the impact of a wealth tax. https://pudding.cool/2022/12/y... [pudding.cool]
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The yard sale model is an interesting thought challenge, but nothing more. It doesn't account for wealth creation that a capitalist society generates. Remember that the monetary system isn't a finite resource. If you provide goods and services you generate wealth.
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100Million cap to capitalism would be a big problem, making us all poorer. Imagine Apple never doing a smart phone as they had made all their money from ipod. Perhaps Elon musk being too rich to start Tesla and space-x etc. The people who make lots of money are sometimes benefiting more than themselves and they use their capital for things that benefit all of us. So thank you for your truly limiting idea.
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Talking with people who espouse these kinds of ideas, that seems to be the goal.
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Follows from my Blowjob Theorem-
It cost around $130 - $160 million to have continuous blowjobs from age 15 to 75 (at least as when I calculated it).
When you have enough resources to have something indistinguishable from slavery, it's no longer "you won capitalism" but an active threat.
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The internet became "enshitified" sometime between AOL connecting to USENET and the release of smartphones running made-for-the-unwashed-masses OSes, depending on who you ask. It was all a little better when getting online came with the prerequisite of being at least minimally computer literate.
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That's a cute utopia, but it doesn't work that way. Then as soon as you would reach $100 million, you would kinda spend part of it (buy an expensive yacht or airplane for your spouse or kids) and then will be allowed to make more millions. Also, inflation is a thing, that $100 million limit would have to be increased continuously.
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People don't care. The way this is playing out is more like internal employees fighting while suggesting that customers will somehow bail on it.
Users are largely unaffected by this bickering, especially now that subs are up. And ultimately users are those who generate content.
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ooh you mean
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It's like watching dominoes fall, only you can't quite tell if the end of the line branches left or right. Each step so far has been brutally, and predictably obvious, but whether Reddit gets back to its status quo or the mob gets whipped up into action and migrates elsewhere I can't tell.
After all... who actually would want to take Reddit's place? It's not profitable enough to bother.
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You know who I'm liking right now? Yahoo! news and its comment boards. No kidding.
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Or maybe there's no need for anyone to take "Reddit's place". There are plenty of PHPbb forums on the most varied topics. We don't need a central Corp handling online discussions across the board.
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Ooh I know, how about a Web 3.0 version of Reddit where everyone's posts are NFT's which are owned by, and traceable to, the person who posted it?
Such a cunning plan, it couldn't possibly fall prey to some kind of pump and dump MLM scam!
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It's not a polished drop in replacement for reddit, but lemmy is looking better all the time. Folks can either create their communities ( subreddits if you like ) on public instances or host them on their own gear or VMs and everyone else can access them via federation on the other instances.
https://tech.michaelaltfield.net/2023/06/11/lemmy-migration-find-subreddits-communities/ [michaelaltfield.net]
The userbase has been increasing at a pretty high rate since/u/spez initiated reddits suicide attempt.
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After using it for a week or so I haven't come across anyone that seems that nuts yet. Where do the crazies hang out?
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After all... who actually would want to take Reddit's place? It's not profitable enough to bother.
Turns out it's a lot of places depending on the subject matter, but Lemmy seems like it's turning into the best-fit solution. There's a site here [sub.rehab] to help people find alternatives to subreddits and Lemmy seems to represent the largest portion of those (I'm just guessing by eye).
That site is my favorite thing to come out of this whole mess. It doesn't have a huge number of options right now, but I'm really looking forward to seeing that grow. Having a convenient searchable database for topical forums is great.
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What agreements are the mods breaking?
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They didn't break any agreements. The protesting subreddits shut down (as moderators and site rules allow them to do).
Reddit admins sent subreddit owners veiled threats that they were defying the will of their users and if they didn't re-open their subreddits, they'd be replaced. In the spirit of democracy and following the will of the users (as reddit had directed), they re-opened, removed rules that some users might consider restrictive, and obeyed all sitewide rules.
Now reddit seeks to replace these mods for saying "NSFW content no longer requires a tag because the subreddit is tagged as NSFW" (which entirely is within site rules) under the bogus pretense that the change was "false" or not within site rules.
This is just reddit increasing the threats and bullying - either fall into line or we will take over your community by force. You can call that right or wrong morally, or legally, etc. but the subreddit owners who changed their rules in protest did not violate the terms of the site by doing so.-
Pre-emptively responding to myself before somebody quotes the article:
Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt said in a statement: "It's not OK to show people NSFW content when they don't want to see it. In line with our Moderator Code of Conduct, we'll remove moderators and restrict communities where moderators are engaging in malicious conduct, like allowing rule-violating behavior or encouraging the submission of sexually explicit content in previously safe-for-work spaces."
The subreddits that reddit admins nuked the admins on did neither. Subreddits marked NSFW go beyond being tagged as NSFW on post titles, they actually gain a consent prompt that "this subreddit is NSFW and 18+, do you want to continue?"... beyond that, the subreddits didn't encourage the submission of sexually explicit material. They merely noted that tagging individual posts as NSFW was no longer required (abides by site rules, which do not require individual submissions to be manually tagged as NSFW if the subreddit they are posted on is tagged NSFW on the whole).
He added that mods "incorrectly marking a community as NSFW is a violation of both our Content Policy and Moderator Code of Conduct."
Despite this PR statement, neither is mentioned in either of those terms.
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FFS, 'they didn't technically break any rules', fine.
But if you are going to break the spirit of being a mod which is to keep a sub orderly, consistent, and on topic - you should be removed for just being a bad moderator.
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Reddit, and investors, don't care about mods. They care about eyeballs. The "mass" of users. What will determine the fate of Reddit is whether the change in moderation is going to piss off the users.
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But if subreddits end up filled with off-topic content and trolls due to insufficient content vetting, users will stop coming.
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It's almost as if Reddit were something awful!
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Honestly 30% of content removed by mods seems kind of low. I could easily live with that much more junk in most feeds I follow on Reddit.
However lost in that figure is how much user blocking comes into play, in terms of blocked users no longer able to post anything that needed to be removed to begin with.
I think user blocking is a much mire key factor even than content removal, so I wonder how much of that is done by Reddit vs. mods.
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Yep, a deal hath been done. These concerns were most certainly brought up by the lower levels long ago and they were yeah, yeahed and platituded in to being quiet while that what they knew would happen does before their eyes.
It went before the board and they were glossed on the problems that wouldn't occur. Business had to be done and will be. And in reality all these concerns are secondary to the IPO and the potential increase in wealth that needs to occur here to show success. Hehe.
What's
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After 13 years, I deleted my reddit account and all my comments. I intended to wait until RiF shut down, but I just don't see value of reddit anymore.
Maybe my 'niche' subs weren't niche enough, but the content isn't as exciting as it used to be. Every user is just a variation of every other user. No one in the comments has a personality beyond surly cynicism. I've never looked for a particular user because everyone just says the same crap... which is usually just a variation of the top comment and whateve
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If only more people were like this, instead many stay just to burn the place down and start riots for their own enjoyment and pettyness. People and specifically the moderators recently forget they are guests on someone else's platform.
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I just deleted my account and left but no. Reddit owns internet discussion and if they can’t be good stewards they need to have a bite taken out so the internet has enough wandering posters to breathe new life into something else. The site will continue to live as a lame shithole though,
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The free work Reddit moderators do has been valued at $3.4 million annually...
I very seldom visit Reddit and have never posted there so I could easily be wrong. But it seems to me that replacing the moderators would cost a lot more than $3.4 million for a year. It's not as though you can send out an SOS to the head-hunting firms saying "We need a lot of experienced Reddit moderators, stat".
Sure, once you have those moderators on the payroll you could likely keep them for a figure in the low millions; but I think replacing even a large chunk of the existing ones would cost a lot more. In addition to procurement costs, there would be lost ad business while the subreddits spend a few months in turmoil with fewer posts and fewer eyeballs.
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Erm moderating is not something you need experience in. Hell I'll go right out and say 100% of moderators got their gig without experience, and to be honest it shows on Reddit where moderating is generally a shitshow.
But ultimately there are plenty of would be dictators happy to line up to take a slice of a kingdom to rule over. It's not something Reddit would ultimately spend a cent on, much less 340 million cents.
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Probably all true, but I think of subreddits as being subcultures as well. The moderation is a key part of the culture, and bringing in new mods who don't know the players and the unwritten rules could result in member attrition. Especially so when lots of members are already pissed off with Reddit's bigwigs.
Reddit might just put moderators on the payroll - they're tightening the screws and may be willing to spend money now in order to gain the control they feel they need to get the investment they want. I'
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$3.4 million doesn't seem like a lot, given reddit's valuation in the billions. Maybe reddit thinks it can just replace the mods with paid employees.
That could work for existing subs, at least for the ones covering mainstream topics and the ones for which moderation doesn't require any specialized knowledge. That probably represents a large majority of what consumers actually look at on reddit. It doesn't allow for the creation of new subs though, and that's an awful lot of what makes reddit work and what allows it to grow and stay relevant.
But if they just want to keep things from collapsing until the IPO, and they don't care what happens after, then this seems like a viable option.-
Its not. how many full time employees can you pay for $3.4m? Now consider there are 1000s of mods. The math doesn't work. Also, before you get any ideas about an army of mods in India, how well do you think they could mod a US politics sub? US (or European, or Asian) cultural knowledge is required for many subs.
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This jumped out at me as well. I'd be interested to know who chundered up this number (and whose payroll they're on). Simple arithmetic will show that $3.4E+06 will get you maybe 20-30 full-time people in the SF Bay area. There's no way Reddit can replace thousands of moderators, each with domain-specific knowledge, with a mere 30 people.
It seems like, every time Huffman opens his mouth, he insults his userbase, his for-gratis workforce, and digs his commercial grave even deeper.
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Aren't Redditors cute. They think subreddits are democracies. Bless their little young naive souls.
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Imagine a world where as many people fought with that much energy for democracy or against world hunger as people fighting for what's right on an internet forum...
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Some small little password safe app developer tried to tell me it would just not be a sustainable business model, and never was, to be selling one time purchase licenses. So they absolutely HAD to switch to a subscription only model..
The insane greed of the hollow suits-n-ties is seriously ruining the few good things we have.
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I love the general comment, but do you realise you're talking about a site that's not actually profitable right? It's hardly greed to want to balance books.
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i thought so too, and there aren't any proper fiscal records, but according to most "business analysis" estimates reddit is actually quite profitable. ofc that might be all hogwash, but there's that.
and that would be just advertising + subscription models (marginal), not counting the value of the huge body of text they already own as source for llm mining which could be the real jackpot even if it were a one-off opportunity, so largely unaffected by whatever happens to the userbase now, and presumably the w
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..and yet NONE of this will stop ME from using ADBLOCK, rendering this ENTIRE situation moot.
Firefox + Adblock = BEND OVER AND FUCK YOUR OWN FACE!
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Adblock sucks. Use ublock Origin [mozilla.org].
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Or even better with more control, uMatrix from the same author. Although I still don't know if one replaces the other so I have both enabled probably duplicating resource use.
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It was a generic term. I am using UO currently.
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Can only imagine what the board meeting conversation was like...
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Maybe it's time to make Reddit profitable, and if so, share the profits with the mods who run it. That said, I don't think the API subscription was primarily motivated by the need to make Reddit profitable now, rather it was to keep AI LLM's from being trained on Redit for free, or in other words, keep them from stealing the data.
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Their model is strikingly reminiscent of an MLM / pyramid scheme.
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this has cheered me up no end. entitled babies get a free website and they want paying for the favour
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