> Oh well, it was great while it lasted.
Also an eight-year user; couldn't agree more.
Also an eight-year user; couldn't agree more.
I bet most folks who don't frequent the site, and haven't used it over the holiday weekend will come back and not even know anything had transpired and don't feel any decline. I've used the site daily for a long time and it is fine by me. Maybe I just don't get upset that I can't say and do anything I want on the site because I know that is silly.
Shutting down creep subreddits like fatpeoplehate and others is totally fine and isn't stifling anyones free speech. No one has a right to be able to post whatever they want on a 3rd party website, fortunately to many and unfortunately to some the Internet is no longer the Wild Wild West.
And I go on Reddit, like, every day.
I'm personally fine with those subreddits existing, free speech and all that, but I agreed with the decision to ban it. You step over the line when you start actively harassing people.
> Also an eight-year user; couldn't agree more.
I've also been around since nearly the beginning (coming up on tenth cakeday) and I feel very similarly.
I expressed as much in Alexis' modtalk thread, and I was glad to see many others doing the same. Site usability issues aside, frankly I couldn't care less about the admin-moderator and moderator-user dynamic of the default subs. The large-scale reddit community lost my interest years ago in typical Eternal September fashion.
But I feel, on the whole, betrayed by the new direction of the site. Not only does it not reflect the early days of reddit that drew me in -- it doesn't even seem to reflect a natural growth-driven evolution of the platform.
I find myself losing all remaining interest in reddit and suspect I'll delete my account in the coming weeks if there aren't major changes to
(a) the horrendous attitude of the [user-facing] admins,
(b) communication channels between reddit engineers and users who try to contribute to site development,
(c) the ancient moderation tools that can't handle subreddits over 50 thousand users.
It's been a great run. Really, what an amazing decade. But, at least for me, these recent events are just the final blow. They represent a turning point in reddit and a turning point in my own life. These discussion silos of the early 2000s all feel bloated and fairly useless now.
This sort of whiny bullshit has been on reddit forever, the truth is the mods went for a power play because they didn't like what the admin's did, and the users got thrown under the bus.
As a redditor of many years I just don't give 2 shits about it and I blame the mods more for the bullshit than reddit itself.
If each subreddit with 30,000 or more subscribers (all 1,000 of them) required just 5 hours of moderation per day, and that cost $8/hr, that's over $10 million/yr.
This is ignoring many mods are industry specialists who could charge $50-200/hr for the time they're donating to reddit.
Saying they would like their tools updated and to be taken seriously is a small "power play" considering the massive amount of labor they donate to the site each year.
There seems to be this disingenuous need for those who are anti-reddit in this case to try and inflate what these people actually do.
By and large, these mods are not content creators, they're mods. The people who post links on reddit are also not content creators, they're simply people who found something and posted a link on a site meant for linking stuff.
Moderating takes work, but this idea that these moderators are people who have specialized knowledge and work day and night on this is horseshit. You do yourself and your cause a disservice when you talk like that.
You seem to think you have a pretty strong grip on things so you tell me: ballpark, how many hours of work do you estimate have been donated to reddit by its moderators and what's the dollar value of that work?
Consider this - what do people who feel their work is undervalued do? They negotiate for higher pay, they look for a better job, they leave. In this particular tantrum, how many moderators of popular subredits can you point to that resigned in protest? I'm guessing that number is also zero.
There's no reason to get sidetracked with a debate about how value is defined, it's a simple question.
Additionally, these people don't want to go. They like whatever intangible benefits moderating brings them. If it was so onerous and awful, they'd simply leave. Again, it's telling that not a single one has.
If you're dying of thirst and somebody offers you a glass of water some will argue the market value of that glass of water was zero. I get that. There's also the value of what that glass of water was worth to you and there are many ways to approximate that value. There's what you were willing and able to pay at the time, there's whatever water prices were at the time if you walked into a store, the size of a loan you would have taken out for it, etc. If for whatever reason this person gave you many life-saving glasses of water over the years, and you showed little appreciation, there may come a point where the two of you will debate the difference betwee market value and utility value.
I'm not trying to debate market vs utility value. I'm just saying if the mods have donated $100 of time over the years it's different from if they've donated $100 million of time over the years. It's an attempt to have a rational discussion about whether or not they're "throwing a temper tantrum." You're getting sidetracked because I'm using dollars to measure utility value instead of market value. If you'd like you can think of it this way: what would the cost of reddit's mods be if this was happening in a "perfect" market where other companies were competing for moderators.
> If it was so onerous and awful, they'd simply leave. Again, it's telling that not a single one has.
This should be covered in the first semester of college economics: if a company has no close competitors you can not assert that its employees must be happy because they haven't left. People have been screaming for months for a similar place to leave to, it doesn't exist yet.
This is a very straightforward exchange - moderators spend time moderating in return for the endorphins and jollies this activity brings them. By 'leave' I mean 'stop moderating'. At any time, any moderator can stop moderating at the loss of nothing more than the endorphins and the gain of extra free time to devote to some other hobby. There is a glut of people who would take up their spot. For nothing. That's where the heavy competition is - lots and lots of people enjoy doing this sort of thing, for whatever reasons. It's not like there is a shortage of internet message boards and in most of them, calls for volunteer mod positions are flooded with applicants.
Reddit is not benefiting from the inexplicable altruism of some sort of rare and highly valuable specialists. And for all their talk, the mods know this too because they did not even threaten with a walk-out, let alone attempt one. Their only leverage was to force their users into this spat with the admins.
As you said, mods are being paid in intangibles. If you log in to a website several days a week to fulfill the responsibilites that come with your position, in exchange for compensation, for years at a time, that's called a job. you may not be an employee but at some point you are working.
I'm not saying we can assign a dollar value to this work, I'm saying we can ballpark an amount of value and we might as well communicate that in dollars. If you'd like we can measure it in millions of hours donated. The magnitude of these numbers alone should make this interesting.
Because reddit has no close competitors there is no market for mods, reddit has a monopoly. Since there is no market to tell us what the value of moddding is we have to guess. If there were a hundred reddits competing with each other for mods we could trust the level of compensation they receive. Glut of supply and only one buyer means compensation will be far under what it would be in a "fair market".
Very few people are going to buy that moderators are employee's of reddit, and therefore, the dynamic is completely different.
I never once said the mods are employees. I pointed out how much what they do would cost if you had to pay people to do what they do. The "debate" is over how value is measured. If you have something new to add please do.
The flaw has already been pointed out to you.
Nailed it.
As for your question, I reject it on the grounds that the assumption is faulty and therefore not worth discussing.