I'll never understand the people who are hell bent on trying to get reddit back. No matter what they won't have a say in anything that happens, own anything, or even have a voice. I'm glad people are finally moving to an open source alternative.
I don't want to be incendiary, but aren't they just getting new mods? Are the new people going to show up and wreck the place for fun?
Its not just replacing mods though. Take the issue that happened with that snack sharing subreddit. The current mods held it for 10+ years. They built several tools that automated verification and rating people who shared with each other and it prevents a LOT of drama and scams. Then reddit replaced them because of the protest. But what about the automated tools that they personally made for "their" sub. The owner of those tools took them down. The new mod put them back up. They will die on the 30th anyways because they wont make the API requirements and if they are forced to stay up byt he new mods then the person who will have to pay reddit for the API usage is no longer the mod there.
This is not a unique situation either. Tons of people made auto moderation bots and tool over the past 16+ years. Most of those tools break today and if the mods are replaced then those tools are stolen from the owners. If the owners remove the tools reddit sees that as protesting and removes the mods.
It's going to be a train wreck and a legal nightmare.
Even in a perfect world you are replacing mods that know the communities and have created them and worked on them for years with a new set of mods with no attachment or experience running those communities.
This is a common argument that I usually see people making, there are a few big problems though with the idea of just getting new moderators. The first problem is that moderation is difficult. It's really easy to look at online posts talking shit about moderators and think that you could do a better job than them but you couldn't and neither could most people, it is a very tedious and difficult process, while there may be many people who are willing to do it there are not as many people who are cut out to do it.
The second problem is that the API changes that Reddit has imposed will make content moderation ever more difficult due to the loss of automated tools that help. People are going to bring up reddit's promise to bring moderating tools to the mobile app or to improve moderation tools in general, this is most certainly an empty promise and even if fulfilled they will do the absolute bare minimum. This is a problem because it means that even for seasoned moderators content moderation is going to become increasingly difficult. Now imagine for somebody who isn't a seasoned veteran moderator, who was freshly appointed by Reddit's administration to fill the roles of mods who quit. I imagine they're probably not going to be able to do this job effectively.
Even If you hired a paid moderator team they would still be nowhere near as effective as the volunteers who poured their heart and soul into it, especially considering that those moderators will be working regular jobs. They're not going to be able to moderate to the lengths that an unpaid volunteer could. This is also ignoring the fact that Reddit very much cannot afford to appoint paid administrators to moderate all of the largest subs on Reddit, considering that making a lot of money is their goal that just isn't sustainable.
So yeah while they could get new moderators it would not be a very easy task for them, and would definitely come with severe drawbacks. Obviously Steve Huffman doesn't really care, he'll probably try it anyway and who knows maybe it'll seem to work out short term, the new moderators won't really be put to the test until they have to deal with a large scale bot attack, either coordinated or uncoordinated. A good thing to keep in mind is that the scammers are watching this scenario, they've already started using it to their advantage by messaging moderators pretending to be administrators as a phishing attack. An experienced mod might be able to Ward this off or not be affected, but in unexperienced mod may fall for this kind of attack without knowing better.
The second problem is that the API changes that Reddit has imposed will make content moderation ever more difficult due to the loss of automated tools that help. People are going to bring up reddit’s promise to bring moderating tools to the mobile app or to improve moderation tools in general, this is most certainly an empty promise and even if fulfilled they will do the absolute bare minimum.
r/ZeroWaste has had to close comments due to spam comment-bots promoting a retail website that the built in tools cannot deal with. Since they can no longer use the third party tools they rely on to handle issues like that they're just not able to operate the sub anymore and are recommending their users visit !zerowaste@lemmy.ml instead.
the new moderators won’t really be put to the test until they have to deal with a large scale bot attack, either coordinated or uncoordinated.
That same ZeroWaste post claimed that as of 17 hours ago SpambotSwatter had a 200k+ backlog in theeir span detection system. The sharks were already circling the water waiting for the defences to drop. I suspect there will be a big increase in spam through this weekend. The question is what that will lead to? Will Reddit magically produce a way to fill in for the lost functionality and solve the issue? Will the flood of disruptive comments just be accepted as the new normal? Will it cause enough disruption to otherwise uninterested users to drive an unignorable level of people kicking up a fuss or just dropping their usage?
I suspect it'll be the worst possible outcome but I guess we just have to wait and see what happens.
Honestly, fuck 'em.
Reddit deserves to crash and burn in my opinion. Every social media platform eventually runs it's course and then is supplanted by something else. No idea if Lemmy is the platform that eventually rises from the ashes of Reddit, but everything from the way Reddit was run from a corporate level, down to the users was toxic as hell. It needs to go away.
With so many of the power-users and mods abandoning ship, we'd better start a death pool for old.reddit.com, since it's mostly power-users that stay with old Reddit. How long until it gets Spez'd so desktop users have to suffer enshittification with the mobile app users?
Reddit is too big to fail, they have achieved critical mass. Keep in mind facebook is still around despite being a reviled company, and instagram certainly hasn't had a mass migration off of the platform either.
At the end of the day Lemmy isn't a replacement to reddit yet. It depends entirely upon it getting traction which thus far still hasn't occurred - we are not at critical mass yet. I hope it happens but there are many reasons why this site could fail even after reddit's admin blunders. Too many people are apathetic to the changes and not all of them are lurkers who do not post or comment.
Today you can't just stop using reddit either, especially for google searches. Too much content is ONLY on reddit. It's a huge problem. We really need a wikipedia style reddit where it's not for profit and still moderated for content.
Facebook rebranded to Meta and burned $13 billion on the "metaverse" to stay relevant. So, Facebook doesn't seem to think that Facebook will be around forever. Reddit does have critical mass, which is an advantage for them. There's no denying that. But, it's their advantage to waste by being overly aggressive and greedy, which they seem to be happy to do.
As for Google searches, it might be less that Reddit is so valuable for search and more that Google has become so bad at providing good search results that Reddit became the go between. There's a lot of very specific knowledge on Reddit, but there's also a lot of redirects from Reddit comments to outside sources that have the info that a Google search should be able to provide. I don't know if Google has the will to fix that problem though. If Reddit can "get back to normal" and continue being Google's sidekick, Google might be happy to return to the status quo. But, once a company like Reddit adopts the policy that "the beatings will continue until morale improves," it's hard to imagine how they can get back to "normal."
Should have thought about that before you started treating them like serfs.
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