Exactly, props to Ars and Sharon for giving mods a voice in this. Really wish more news sites would do this, all I see is articles where Spez gets to control the narrative and tell his view on things (mostly, how wrong mods and users are).
I like the part in every interview with u/spez where he says that the API was never intended to support third-party apps but then never mentions that the official Reddit app is based on the source code of a third-party app they purchased. His logic is impeccable.
The spez articles are gross, especially the interview on The Verge. He's clearly salty at Christian Selig for building an app that iOS users prefer over the default reddit app. He rails against developers making millions on reddit's content. But its not reddit making the content. Reddit is a content aggregator. Stop aggregating your content there. Stop consuming it there. Reddit dies without its power users.
I don't understand why people work as moderators for free for a for profit company. Maybe someone can explain why they are interested in cleaning up subreddits just so reddit can become rich?
I do understand people moderating Lemmy for free, since it's a genuine community and not a company. It makes sense people help eachother here. But reddit?
Is it possible people somehow believe that reddit is some kind of force of good on the internet, despite it's ad filled, censorship - focused behavior?
Back in the day (pre-2015 or so) Reddit used to feel a lot different. Odds are, a lot of the big-name mods came into power back then. It's been a real slow "boil the frog" type approach for many years as they slowly made the logged out user experience worse, then the "new reddit" experience worse... and now the mobile apps.
If you weren't paying attention, it was really easy to fall into a routine where you believed the site's operators still had the users' best interests at heart. Especially if your subscriptions only brought you posts from older subreddits that managed to retain that old feeling. I could see someone wanting to moderate that for free, even if it was out of a naïve belief that it was possible to return to the old days of Reddit.
That being said, they've really gone full mask off as of late. Hard to imagine anyone could return to moderating that for free. The glory days of Reddit are definitely behind us. Here's hoping Lemmy manages to keep the momentum going. So far, it really does feel like the old days on Reddit.
Most, I would wager, weren’t motivated to do it for Reddit. They were motivated to do it for their communities that happened to be on the site.
Moderation— particularly volunteer based moderation— tends to be about the bonds moderators have and develop with the users they interact with every day. Admins are a mixed bag: some of them may have sympathy towards the mods, but ultimately their livelihood is tied to the company line.
A lot of the internet is built on free labor. A lot of that we have been willing to let slide. That willingness ends when the quantum of respect doesn’t get paid for that labor. I don’t know how someone continues moderating on Reddit at this point; barring a big turnaround(and possibly the ouster of current management), it feels like the move should be to migrate their communities elsewhere.
Great writeup about the situation, and wonderful to hear actual mods speak. The requests the community is making are very reasonable. But Spez thinks they're too big to fail.
The only way to prove him wrong is to stay away. In the meantime I've joined Beehaw, subscribed to a couple instances outside of Beehaw, and get my news primarily from the websites that I was otherwise seeing being linked to on Reddit.
Ars is actually super impressive coming out with all these articles on the situation that leans more on the users side considering Ars and Reddit have the same parent company. Well technically Ars' parent company is CondeNast but CondeNast's parent company is the same as Reddit's (Advanced Publications).