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Comment by dncornholio | Hacker News Reader

I would like to see some hard number from people that claim Reddit was hurt from the "API Fiasco". My theory is that this is a very small number of users with a very loud voice. Entitled mods were the only people that closed down subs. Most users did not even support this decision.

Same is happening again now, entitled moderaters who complain about CEO pay.

If anything is destroying Reddit, it's the mods IMO.

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> I would like to see some hard number from people that claim Reddit was hurt from the "API Fiasco".

Probably pretty hard to get. Some of the content I found that went away, was quality content. There are still users posting/discussing stuff in the niches I'm interested in, but all the high-quality discussions have gone missing, and the one's who used to engage in it no longer seem to be using reddit at all.

But there is no objective way to measure "high quality content vs low quality", so it'll be short of impossible to get any objective measures of this, it's just my anecdotal experience with a subset of subreddits.

Entitled mods... you mean the people who work for free to make reddit work? I'm not a mod and I don't have very strong opinion of reddit moderators one way or another (many do), but I think reddit would do well not to make mods angry. They are an unpaid work force.

Anyone who has run a forum knows that mods are paid, usually with ego or duty or power, but they certainly get something from it. Else hundreds of people wouldn't want to be moderators of small phpbb forums much less thousands of people on reddit.

Either way, I don't think compensation swivels the "entitled, power-tripping reddit mod" trope where they ban from their subreddit if you make a comment they disagree with. It's one of reddit's biggest problems.

As far as I can tell, the business model of modern social media is to make money by selling advertisers access to children, gamblers, addicts, and profligates. The content and moderation that people think is the purpose of social media doesn't actually make any money and never has.

At the same time, good moderation is what made reddit what it is, if there weren't mods doing free work for reddit in 2009 it would be flooded with YouTube comments style of content since that's what low friction posting without moderation achieves.

Yeah but Reddit doesn't owe the mods anything, the users do.

What? Reddit owes their entire platform to their volunteer moderators and users who contribute content. Reddit the company adds almost nothing of value, the tech isn't exactly special -- if anything it's so bad as to be hindrance.

The dog doesn't owe anything to the hand that feeds it, but it would still do well not to bite it.

Well, my experience is only anecdotal, but after the third party apps shut down (RIF in my case) I checked reddit less, maybe once every few days. This wasn't a conscious decision or a protest. I tried the main Reddit app and hated it. One of the key draws to my active participation in Reddit had been killed.

A number of subreddits I moderate were shutdown by reddit for being unmoderated. It turns out a lot of mods disengaged. None of the subreddits I was a part of were a part of the protests, but banning communities by moderators that disengaged achieved the same outcome as a protest effectively. Maybe someone has numbers for how many communities were banned for being unmoderated, and did this number increase after the API changes?

The hypothesis without data is that users [mods/power users] who cared about reddit, who contributed to reddit, have largely left or disengaged to an extent.

I would like to see numbers myself, though. However, looking at reddit/r/all, I suspect much of that activity is botting.

I mean, no one can seriously post "my gf cheated, AITAH for breaking up with her?".

Come on...

So many endless repost-bots :-/

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