> I am absolutely blown away by the number of subs that have gone private
My understanding is that moderators are the most upset category by API changes, because they are losing some unique mod features from 3rd party apps.
My understanding is that moderators are the most upset category by API changes, because they are losing some unique mod features from 3rd party apps.
Definitely the Apollo and handling of the API changes is annoying.
But this was much more a straw that broke the camel’s back thing from a mod perspective.
I’ve mentioned this before but I am on the mod team for r/portland and the Reddit admin has been terrible at providing tools and support for serious content mod problems and straight up platform abuse.
There was an incident where we had someone who stuck out as disturbed say they would be carrying out a mass shooting event.
There are a lot of problematic posts but this one was so subtly wrong and the second post from the user, rewording it from another pac NW sub.
IIRC, at the time there was no way to report a content type problem like this to the Reddit admin. The content reporting UX was a dark pattern, seemingly purposefully or thoughtlessly designed to avoid allowing mods to report this kind of concern.
I found a category to report it to anyway, and had to follow up multiple times to get any confirmation that an actual person had received my report.
When I finally did get a reply, the message was a short form letter, providing the least possible commitment to addressing the concern. It was just a terrible showing. I recall discussing this specific instance w other portland mods and how much of a bummer it was to not have the company’s support on such a serious problem.
But much more pedestrian of a concern has been astroturfing. There has been a persistent effort to highlight news and article headlines intended to divide people along racial and economic lines.
It is ~ the same playbook used in targeted ads on Facebook leading up to the 2016 presidential election. This has been going on _years_, and it is no secret.
It got to be so bad, at one point I emailed YC managing director and Reddit board member [1] Michael Seibel, about the problem and still got no reply.
While Portland is a large city sub and likely has unique unaddressed moderation challenges inherent to it, I imagine there are many stories from the all-volunteer moderators in large subs who have been let down in various ways by Reddit.
[1] https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-welcomes-michael-seibe...
Did you report that to 911?
Also, this entire thing about the API has made me feel that there is a future for decentralized apps, where money in the forms of tokens can exchange hands between - content creators, mods, consumers and those that help run the network, without a central entity consuming all the profits.
No one is forcing us to mod. We mod because we value the communities we mod and like being active parts of them. I don't want Reddit to pay me, it isn't a job, it's a passion and a hobby.
I use third party apps exclusively, and will not be participating in Reddit after Apollo shuts down.
It’s how chatgpt works, what is the pushback with this? I heard Apollo requires the app to communicate with an Apollo server. So are the Apollo devs mad they are now being charged for their data stream?
Most mod tools should be unaffected simply because they fall well-inside the free usage limits. As for the remaining mod tools? Reddit admins have even resorted to making explicit promises to fix those if they break (probably just by exempting them from API limits).
But most (if not all) Reddit moderators are also reddit power users, some of the biggest power users too. And power-users as a whole dislike the direction reddit is moving. Even if they don't use the 3rd party mobile apps themselves, they see the writing on the wall. They typically use old.reddit.com, which hasn't really seen any updates in the last 5 years and it seems likely that it will be next on the cutting block.
So even if their mod tools aren't going to be effected, moderators have decided to draw the line here and make a stand.
The official apps and tooling is paltry in comparison, and rarely used because 3rd party tools have done the job. Even basic things like mod queue in the mobile apps is not a thing in the official app.
“Mod tools” in the way it’s been defined by Reddit is an extremely small category of apps which doesn’t adequately cover the tools mods actually use to do their unpaid job.
Reddit has committed to fixing this, sure. But they’ve also said that for the last few years and ignored the most basic of features so why should mods trust that they’ll actually stick to their promises this time, when they haven’t for many, many years?