Won't accomplish anything - mods can't delete the content itself, just remove the listing from public display. All that has to happen is run a script reversing post removals by [moderator XYZ] between [time period] and the sub is restored; IIRC they've used similar tools, or methods, in the past when a mod has gone rogue and tried to kill a community with the same methodology.
Anomander
joined 2 years ago
Site Admin have opposed "vote out" mechanics since debuting subreddits, entirely in the understanding that as bad as the current system is - reducing it to rank populism would be worse and far easier for malicious actors to exploit. I vague recall Spez being vocal about that issue, years ago - how convenient he forgets all those opinions once it doesn't serve Reddit's interests to just ignore flaws in their mod system.
The best irony in all this is that he's determined that even minority dissent to participation in the protests warrants sweeping changes to facilitate - citing the importance of accommodating those perspectives - but massive dissent against reddit changes is a perspective he'll do anything to avoid even acknowledging, much less accommodating. Dissent really matters when he agrees with it, and we have a laundry list of excuses for why dissent he doesn't like simply doesn't count.
There were years there when any watermark from another site would get OP lynched in the comments, and now Admin over there is sufficiently out of touch they're going to start doing it to their own content.
Bets are on that this is a stupid kneejerk test from Reddit, worried that post-migration community hubs are going to "profit from their content" the same way Reddit did to places like ifunny or 9gag during it's entire growth arc.
I think they're rolling it out rapidly at this point in time for the same reason that they've resisted it for years - it's going to 'force' subs / mods to become more populist and more easily bent & manipulated by the whims of people "outside" the community, like reaching them via /all or similar.
No denying that Reddit has been ass as far as accountability and addressing problem moderators - but unless this mechanism is made super arcane black-box shit to prevent manipulation, this is very liable to result in tightly focused communities getting completely redirected.
Worse IMO is how much anything like a mod "election" is like grade-school Class President elections - it's not about realistic campaign points, or about accomplishing meaningful things, it's about popularity and talking hot shit, regardless of practical outcomes or larger implications. The kid who is gonna abolish detention, make recess four hours, and give our free gummy frogs every Tuesday is gonna win the vote - even if they can't realistically make changes to the school and can't afford candy for the class each week.
Just wait until spam rings start hijacking small subs via botnet mod votes.
I think that the Pao plot arc always planned on bringing Spez back.
Reddit - especially then - had a sort of reverence for the OG founders and discussion would often model them as the "real" redditors and people who really understood the community, changes since they sold were blamed on corporate interests and people were forever complaining that "shit like this wouldn't happen if ..." various founders or original staff were still around. I think it was always misplaced, but it was the culture at the time.
So Pao was brought in as a scapegoat - she was going to make wildly unpopular changes, take the heat, take a dive, and be replaced. She'd get a fat bag, an absolutely glowing reference on her CV, and a huge jump in her career - then Reddit would bring in the popular original founder that redditors liked and respected, and everyone would feel optimistic again. The changes would remain, the community would feel like they'd got their pound of flesh, that they had been appeased, and the site could get back on track.
Don't get me wrong, he's been a hack all along, he's been willing to sell his values to the highest bidder pretty much all along.
And now Spez is playing the same role. He's taking the face position and eating the heat over a bunch of shitty corporate boardroom decisions - that he definitely was party to - in order to inflate the IPO valuation and his cut of the cash. They're going to try and make it look profitable enough and healthy enough that someone else takes the hot potato and then make for the goddamn hills once they're not bagholding anymore.
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.
I think what was even more infuriating was his insistence on validating even the smallest dissent against sub locking as justifying overruling the mods and community, while the entire mess was caused by his refusal to engage in good faith with dissent against his company's decision.
Dissent against mods he also disagrees with is sacred and needs protecting. Dissent against himself and Reddit Inc is meaningless noise that he both doesn't care about and is actively working to silence and prohibit.
It was hilarious the first couple times it came up - but it absolutely was a massive oversight, especially in light of how wild-west the subreddit space was in that same era.
They really should be talking about how these changes are going to be affecting reddit's sources of information.
Yeah. Protest and discourse on reddit about these changes and their impact on the site and its communities has been unfortunately domineered and nearly hijacked by the mods leading the protests. That has meant the average user has a hard time understanding how their experience will be affected - and made it incredibly easy for Reddit Inc to spin the conflict as "between Admin and Moderation, with users being caught in the crossfire" - instead of being about the changes and consequences of cutting API access to all users' experience on the site.
Admin over there has weaponized the userbase' underlying distrust for mods against the protest as a whole, and a large number of mods have fed that perception by acting unilaterally with regards to protest actions.
Dorf is probably the most milage I've got out of $10 in years. I got it on sale during early access, and it's been my go-to casual game when I've got something else on the go pretty much ever since.
There's also a surge of folks understanding that the communities they loved might become inaccessible via Reddit fuckery, or even that replacements on other platforms need to exist so that if people go looking - it exists for them to join.
Communities are rarely self-building, but having a readily accessible and intuitive subreddit/magazine name for your topic certainly helps - you need to have enough traffic and enough activity that there's something happening when a newbie stumbles across your space. Getting the on-point keyword really makes a huge difference in that.
Holy shit the lede was a little buried from the title.
RIF had a revenue-sharing agreement with Reddit starting in 2012, and they had a working model to ensure that Reddit was compensated - and profited from - the API usage. RIF voluntarily worked out a deal to share it's revenues back to Reddit. That deal was terminated after Spez took over as CEO, under his watch, and that cancellation is big enough that it absolutely would have gone via the CEO for approval. Spez decided to turn down the revenue share agreement with RIF, only to come back seven years later and complain like Reddit was somehow being taken advantage of due to the costs of app API usage.
What an absolutely meaty disclosure: the same problem Spez is complaining about now is a problem he personally caused shortly after rejoining Reddit.