yanderekko

Yep, and if it applies to abortion, why not third-trimester abortion? Why is that relevant to a privacy interest?

Where is the right to privacy in the Constitution, btw? Sounds like the whole thing is legislating from the bench! Maybe we should bring back Lochner-style scrutiny of minimum wage laws under a newly-discovered "right to earn a living"?

Yep. Roe vs. Wade was one of the most egregious examples of "legislating from the bench" in the latter 20th century? How many people who would hand-wring over recent SCOTUS decisions oppose Roe on these grounds? Or is this a convenient exception? Griswold? How about Lawrence vs. Texas?

>Remember: profits are a direct measure of the inefficiency of a given market.

Marginal profits are, not absolute profits..

Yeah, obviously one has to be careful about lamenting this stuff, but it seems pretty clear that #MeToo not only ended the careers of many successful senior creative visionaries but it probably provoked a more-cautious stance from many companies towards the mere idea of having powerful visionaries to begin with, especially if they're male. They represent potentially catastrophic single points of failure, after all - and it's not just coming from #MeToo, but having an errant tweet or even an inkling of "problematic" political beliefs could suddenly end one's career and whatever works they have in motion would be ruined.

But as a consequence of this caution, we're also seeing that Disney and Pixar and other firms are just dissipating their brand capital by putting out safe, corporative-approved and committee-driven works. Within the next 5 years we'll probably see the first movies released where most of the writing was done via LLMs. I'm going to guess that it won't end well, unless the LLMs get much better...

Okay, but Reddit would sensibly prefer free labor + cheap tooling over free labor + costly tooling.

Except it wasn't actually free, that's the entire issue..

I mean, if moderating is going to become literally impossible than the moderators should provide more sober, detailed arguments for why this is the case. As far as I'm aware this just hasn't been done. It's just "we have these tools we like and we don't want to lose them", which is a far weaker argument. If there's a serious rationale for why moderating will suddenly require 10x the effort or whatever as before, I'd love to see it.

So you seriously expect that when June 30th rolls around, basically all major subs are going to be flooded with CP and moderators across the site will be overwhelmed, plunging everything into chaos? That's an amazing prediction - guess we'll see how it plays out.

>They were expressing their loyalties by saying they want to keep working for free for the company … as long as their tools aren’t deliberately broken by the company

Reddit is under no obligation to find these terms acceptable. Moderators absolutely can moderate without the API.

Yeah, the dude politely asked for 4-6 weeks of closure time.. hard to believe that he expected Reddit to find this reasonable. Unfortunately, the admins probably lack bandwidth to go back and forth on these things and so they just yeeted the top mod rather than tell him that's unacceptable.

I'd distinguish between small and large communities. For example, if the World of Warcraft subreddit implodes somehow it's basically guaranteed that another one will arise, although you do often get awkward userbase splits, eg. /r/gameofthrones vs. /r/freefolk. I'd say that basically any community with 100k members will continue onwards from a mod implosion.

For smaller communities (<10k members), it's probable that reformation would not happen in a clear way if a founding mod destroyed it, unless the community is booming.

For communities in the 10k-100k range, I could see things going either way.

"No bad tactics, only bad targets". The only thing the activists would condemn here would be if Huffman were seriously assaulted on the street, or his family being harassed (although it seems like nowadays close adult relatives/associates who fail to denounce a cancellation target become fair game as well.) Anything else - legal or otherwise - would be filed under "actions having consequences". This is sadly the norm for social media activism in 2023. spez needs to accept that he's lost his membership in

Quite frankly, this is a good PR move, although I would assume that it's still better to maintain a low profile. Still, I'm sure a lot of people are hoping for more events like this to occur in order to punish Reddit.

>I direct you to Twitter's valuation.

That's an imperfect correlate of user experience. A lot of sites have banned NSFW content for the sake of their valuations in ways that have obviously agitated their userbase.

A lot of people on the left basically can't imagine a social media platform being good unless it heavily restricts right-wing speech/expression.

"Ugh. This place is such a ghost town that it even has Republicans and old people."

>Next, they'll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they're dedicated to. Eg. r/starwars to Disney, r/startrek to Viacom/Paramount, etc.

This is obviously not going to happen, and insinuations to the contrary are just sour grapes. The fact that this could even be upvoted speaks poorly to the Redditization of HN.

>Aaron Swartz is rolling in his grave.

He has been for years. These same powermods have been at the forefront of demanding changes that undermined his vision.

>Is this more rigged election without evidence talk?

I mean, the user above just provided his personal testimony on the subject.

In any case, why should we have a presumption that a poll with say 10k votes on a sub with 10m users is a representative sample of user opinion? Not only would I say that we shouldn't, but I'd say that we shouldn't for reasons that the pro-blackout people often point to - that even if the changes don't impact most users it does disproportionately impact powerusers and mods.

But when someone says "maybe powerusers and mods are disproportionately influencing these polls" then we're suddenly asking for strong evidence??

Yep. Given that this is HN, try looking at /r/California. It's basically a person fief for a single user (granted, he's not nearly as obnoxious as many Reddit mods.) Yet simply because this user owns the obvious name, there is no real alternate sub for California-level news.

I think the median mod deserves almost zero credit for "creating" the communities that they oversee. The welfare of the mods and the communities are usually not tightly intertwined, and scenarios where the mods are committed to destroying these communities should serve as a counterexample to this idea.

>Ownership of reddit/r/$name isn't a valuable quantity if the people who contribute react badly to replacing the people running the joint being replaced by management stooges.

The idea that Redditors had some sort of prior affection for moderators is laughable. At best this is just tribalism where a vocal minority of Redditors is so upset at spez that they're opportunistically creating a narrative of heroic moderators being oppressed by evil admins that's reminiscent of an inverted Ayn Rand story.

The community is exactly why toxic mods should be removed.

Nope, that was a bad action. On the other hand, booting the mods that are holding the subs hostage is a good action.

>Setting a sub to private is moderation

Destroying a community is not. There's plenty of obvious precedents where mods that attempted to destroy their own subreddits or merely hold them hostage have been replaced. These were considered obvious decisions, but now that people are angry at the admins we have some weird Mod Rights movement bubbling up.

>How do you tell a willing user with the intention to keep a sub running as is, and a willing user who just wants to burn it all down, turn it into their own fiefdom, or worse?

Reddit has replaced mods before. This isn't a new problem, the only novelty here is its scale.

>Reddit clearly doesn't understand the product. When users join a sub it's because they like the content and tacitly approve of the moderation.

How can this "tacit approval" be applied to mods but not the admin policies that constrain the mods? I participate on plenty of subreddits where the mods are clearly despicable; however, there are simply no viable alternatives in terms of the actual community content.

What does CEO trust have to do with any of this?

>They're still interested. They're just protesting your policies.

The implication is that prioritizing the latter at all points in time is incompatible with the former. Seems reasonable enough. What does it mean to be "interested in moderating" if the outcome is that you do no actual moderation?

>And they're still insulting everyone's intelligence, as if a single mod reopening against strong subreddit consensus was something Reddit Inc. needed to begrudgingly "respect", rather than something they're eagerly encouraging.

For the sake of grandstanding you might want them to come out and say "any of you scabs want to cross the picket line for us?", but only spez would be stupid enough to actually do that.

>We formed connections and communities and friendships on sites like Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system.

I would absolutely take profit-driven moderation over the petty tyranny of your stereotypical reddit mod. These mods are not heroically channeling some sort of vox populi.

My point is that the marginal impact will be negligible. The people who would get angry over forced reopenings are the people that are already angry over the API changes. Why would Reddit care about upsetting the people that are already allegedly leaving the site?

There's not going to be a populist revolt against Reddit stopping angry mods from destroying their communities and/or actively siphoning them to other sites. The people who are already angry may get angrier, but they're already leaving so who cares?

Once you've chosen Exit as your protest strategy, you lose Voice.

And you actually destroyed the community on Reddit in the process?