Reddit CEO says the mods leading a punishing blackout are too powerful and he will change the site's rules to weaken them

Spez: this will blow over Also spez: this cannot be allowed to continue

Ah, so the blackout isn't as "unsuccessful" as he wants people to believe it to be...

I've seen some here openly despair that leaving reddit didn't do anything.

Spez, CEO of Reddit and former mod of the r/jailbait subreddit losing his shit very publically for days proves otherwise.

...And it's also a reminder that the reddit community we loved has already been destroyed by ownership, anyone returning would be returning to a shadow that disdains its own users and works to disempower them with every update. They're even undeleting user's deleted posts. If they can't respect users enough to be able to delete their own content, why enrich them?

The implication here that the blackout was mods on a power trip when in my experience, most subreddits were already put to a vote, and the users voted for this.

Not for nothing, but a key feature of fascism is that you're "enemy" is both weak and strong at the same time.

So the blackout is not a big deal AND the mods coordinating the blackout are too powerful...

ACAB - All CEOs Are Bastards

I really, and truly, don't get why there are any mods left after this fiasco. If I were them I'd take down all the CSS and all the bots and all the things I'd worked on over the years and just quit. Reddit completely exists on the back of unpaid labor from the mods and they treat them like garbage. Not to mention that the overwhelming response I'm seeing from users is they despise the mods as well. So why are they even in this thing?

I really wish users, who are the only ones that bring real value to a site like Reddit, could vote out the CEO. I guess we are voting with our feet, but it's a shame that we have to go through this stupid lather/rinse/repeat cycle with every user contribution site.

It is almost like we can't trust a for-profit owned social media site to have our interests as their first priority. I don't know what this CEO is doing but it's hard to see a bright future for Reddit in any case. Its too bad for the community but it is really too bad for those working there.

So what will happen is that mods who enforce unpopular rules in a subreddit, such as "no NSFW", will get voted out. This can't possibly go wrong. /s

Funny. That is a feature I wanted for a long time. Question is how in the world will it be implemented. Probably going to pull another Elon and only allow Reddit premium members to vote. Kinda shows the blackout is working and he is trying to find a 'good' PR way to weasel his way out.

Based on the reporting two things seem clear to me: (1) the commercial value of Reddit is fundamentally a question of selling data access; and (2) the major subreddits will be made to continue operations come Hell or high water.

When (not if) Reddit circumvents the blackout by force, the obvious next move is to poison the well—make the data worthless by drowning it in noise (AI-generated, if you've a flair for the poetic). I doubt that will happen since (a) it would require coordination among a substantially larger and more dispersed userbase than the moderators and (b) it's something of a nuclear option, but it's an interesting idea.

Interesting that he mentions that CEOs can be removed by their shareholders, which is quite similar to how reddit currently works-mods can be removed by reddit itself. The "users voting mods out" analogue in the business world would be employees having to power to vote out and replace their CEOs.

Person with power: CEO::mod

Those who make money off of them: shareholders::reddit

Those who provide the content: workers::posters/commenters

End users: customers::advertisers

Sounds to me like spez just made a pretty compelling aruguement that his employees should be able to vote him out!

*edited for formatting

Such a laugh and after putting in arbitray rules himself. If he is such a democratic guy maybe he and the board shoud be able to be voted out by the membership too.

I do think it must be hard for some of the mods. Me I can just walk away from this madness. Mods if you have put your heart and soul into it... well harder. Still how can it be much clearer. Time to move on for them too.

Beatings will continue until morale improves!

The king is replacing his minions with more acceptable minions. So most likely inept as well. Can't sew how poorly this'll go.

LONG LIVE THE FEDIVERSE!

What an absolutely toxic CEO lmao he is so clueless. He doesn't realize the community and the volunteers (moderators) have all of the power. The website is nothing without that.

This whole thing is a shame and I still am going through a morning period about it. Reddit will persist in some diminished state. I can only hope the quality communities and people move here, and that Lemmy rapidly improves (though it is very usable now). The trends so far are good. The value of social media lies in the user base.

Let this be a lesson to all who produce and manage content (that's us users and mods). Don't use platforms that are destined to monetize your data at your expense.

blowing up their site expected with people being friends with elon musk

Funny how that works. And here i was, thinking users made these communities and decided by themselves if they wanna be public or private.

Weird that he suddenly wants to change the system.

Hmm wonder where he got that voting idea from????

And I don't see a single thing about it on r/all. Or anything related to the blackouts.

Article says 3500 subs participated... More than double that did, hell more than that are still down right now.

he is not wrong about moderators being like "landed gentry" in a lot of cases; but on the other hand the blackout already did the damage. Time will tell if he is dead-man-walking, but I already deleted all my content (posts and replies) and unsubscribed from all. Some people may feel angst that the blackout did not "win", but it was a very useful occasion to focus on the reddit phenomenon and recognize our commoditization. I had been glad to contribute content, but if reddit is going to <do what they did> then I am done. That is all the win I need. I will contribute it here (lemmy servers) instead.

In spez's interview with the Verge, he hyperfocused on the fact that locked communities whose "we're locking" posts were comment-disabled would have had a lot of dissent in the comments if the mods had been brave enough to leave them enabled. Completely ignoring, of course, the fact that the upvote ratios told a story of massively overwhelming support.

How does the literal CEO not realize that a comment section with a fair number of dissenters in a highly-upvoted post is just rabble-rousing and don't actually represent a majority? Like, in a scenario where you have 20k upvotes, 1k downvotes, and a comment section where a few hundred people are pissed off and arguing, spez is presenting that as a dissenting majority. What?

What are the odds he gets a rude awakening when he gives this power to the users and they vote in favor of keeping the mod teams in place? (That would imply some awareness of how his site works, though.)

Damn it. I already made my Revenge of The Sith Emperor's speech joke on another post... oh well. I don't have much of a snarky comment to make, this depressing and frustrating situation really speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Man, that entire interview with The Verge was infuriating to read. I ended up deleting all of my comments/submissions from my almost 16 year old account right after reading it. Saying he wouldn't work with Apollo or RIF because they already "threw in towel", just reeks of insincerity. I mean, they both wanted to work with reddit but were basically shut out completely.

He keeps saying they knew about the changes for a while, but in reality the prices weren't released until a couple of weeks ago and it was less than 6 months ago (January) that they were told there were no major changes coming to the API in the medium to long term... like years. Then the changes, without mention of price, were announced April 18th and it wasn't until the end of May when the pricing was official. Plus, they changed how they calculated API limits. Before, it was Client ID + User ID, so each user of a 3rd party app had a limit and now it is just Client ID, so of course any app that has a significant amount of users is going to go over that limit instantly.

Everything, every step of the way has been so disingenuous and rushed.

Reddit talks about their new Developer Platform, but as of last week at least it was invite only and developers that inquired about it got no response. They talk about mod tools in the works to replace what 3rd party apps did, but none of it is released. Just so unnecessarily rushed when it would have been much better to get your dev platform and mod tools at least somewhat open and have like a 3 month grace period after announcing the prices so devs could have a chance to make changes to their apps. Spez just comes out of this looking so out of touch with the community. What a shame.

That kid is in over his head here. He was "hired" as CEO after Ellen Pao's high heels poked through the glass floor, despite him having no education or experience in leadership of that level. There was no one else willing to pick it up at that time. He was like "ok, I'll do it" (as per his own introduction) and users were like "ok, he was there from the start, maybe he understands us. He's one of use, he also can't iron a shirt."

I'm all for letting the common man take control, but this is clearly a guy who thinks he's the next tech-jesus or something, just because the userbase grew out of Facebook.

The actions he's doing now only confirms that he's trying to get his payout and then let it rot. He is just like you and me. Get a check, go home. No visionary ideal, not virtues. Yeah well, at least I have some integrity.

I wouldn't trust him to operate a broomstick let alone a billion dollar company.

Reddit is over with.

@AllonzeeLV

If you're a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. So a politician needs to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by its shareholders

This comparison is so stupid; is spez gonna send me an ID or something? Will I need to hand Reddit my birth certificate or anything in order to keep using it and sign a contract with them or something? Where is that contract gonna be registered?

Anyone would be able to look for any place where there is a vote, then join the community, vote whatever they want and then casually walk away. Or you could follow all subreddits or a bunch of them that you want to influence (say any pro-ukrainian ones). Then you'd cast a vote to whoever you'd like and walk away.

It's so ridiculous!

Good, the more damage he does to reddit, the better.

I say u/mellowboob is the first to go!

CEO and admin making wildly unpopular decision that users almost unanimously went against complaining about how undemocratic his website is. Is he really this unaware?

@AllonzeeLV at this point mods who are staying on Reddit are just prisoners waiting to get castrated

Okay if you want to talk like that make Reddit a CO-OP or shut up.

How can this guybhave such a persecution fethish when he litterally holds all the cards.

@AllonzeeLV im so fucking sad about losing Apollo...

It's amusing to see the manchild spez melting down because he can't get his way. 😹

I'm so glad to be free of Reddit. It looks so ugly from the outside.

Might have been welcome a year ago. But in this case, 'too powerful' means 'nobody should be able to stand up to me on MY website'.

I'd love to see some kind of voting process for mods or policy be enacted only to have the users vote for even more lockdowns.