Reddit is reaching out to moderators after tensions rose over recent policy changes and API pricing. A Reddit admin acknowledged the strained relationship and outlined new weekly feedback sessions and other outreach efforts to repair ties. However, moderators remain skeptical of Reddit’s efforts given mixed results from past initiatives. Many mods feel Reddit has been unwilling to make meaningful changes to address their concerns like more accessible API pricing or exemption for accessibility apps. After a tumultuous few months, moderators have very low expectations that Reddit’s latest efforts will result in real changes.
It’s a lot of abuse to take, I’m kind of surprised more redditors haven’t jumped ship. It’s so much cozier here on lemmy, I just think maybe redditors have no idea what the water is like over here and so they haven’t even dipped a toe into any alternatives.
Tbh, Lemmy is much more difficult to get into. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t somewhat dogmatically against reddit’s shenanigans. My buddy who uses the official app doesn’t really care about any of this stuff. Even I feel a bit alienated by Lemmy because it feels so dominated by tech workers. Your average meme-enjoyer is going to see multiple instances, buggy apps, none of their favorite communities and they’re going to bounce off it. I like Lemmy but we need to be realistic about how palatable it is.
It’s gotten a lot better in a few weeks.
There’s a lot that can be improved, and people are working on it. It just needs more time as things settle
Yeah, when Digg did the dumb thing all those years ago Reddit didn’t start eclipsing it for another two or three years. This feels very similar to that time tbh. Lemmy will get there, but I imagine it’ll take longer due to its fragmented nature scaring some non-techies so I’d guess four years and we’ll see numbers to rival Reddit. If you care about that, I kind of like the smaller communities, honestly.
Too bad there’s not a RemindMe Bot on Lemmy yet, this would be perfect for that lol
As someone in tech since 2004 I’m so very confused to have zero idea what digg was… Completely missed the boat on that one.
It was just another link aggregation site like Reddit, you didn’t miss too much tbh
It’s an early adopter problem, and it could be much worse (looking at you, Tildes, where I swear I was one of less than 10 users who were not either well compensated professionals (tech or otherwise), or in school at the time to become one, at least before the latest Reddit exodus. At least most of the Lemmy instances, while tech heavy, don’t have the same smugness that a lot of nearly-exclusively highly compensated white collar worker spaces do. (Not that Tildes is unique in that space in the least, Hacker News is utterly insufferable, and the personalfinance and povertyfinance subreddit split arose for the same reasons)
Luckily I think Lemmy has more potential to get more early adopters who don’t work with tech professionally, especially on an instance like Beehaw. I haven’t felt like some kind of lower class interloper (as someone who is in lower level retail management for work) here, unlike many other super techy spaces.
I’ll tell you why I haven’t deleted reddit – aside from tech-heavy discussion here (Linux, Reddit, tech generally, that sort of thing), there isn’t a fediverse equivalent to things like the sports or food subreddits I follow.
I agree iscussions on lemmy are higher-quality and friendlier, for sure. But for a lot of the things I use reddit for they just don’t really exist here yet.
Same, I’m mostly part of specific communities based around Europe/language/hydroponics which simply don’t exist here and am here mainly out of spite and solidarity.
Well, tensions were building, then there was an Incident, now they are trying a reconciliation so there will be a moment of calm. See here for more info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_of_abuse
I really feel for the mods who’ve spent years building and curating communities, only to have them decimated by forces outside of their control. Reddit never listens to its userbase and I’d be surprised if they start now. I mean, they were regularly having calls with TPA developers only to blindside them with the API changes and treat them poorly for having questions. I don’t see how it will be any different for moderators, unfortunately.
Yeah I think this is purely them doing the bare minimum to look like they want to communicate while at the same time doing nothing. See also: app developers who tried to work with Reddit that Reddit absolutely ignored.
This is a shallow PR stunt that anyone familiar with the situation will see through. Its only meant to be seen by investors who only know what’s going on with Reddit from reading Forbes and Bloomberg
Less than the bare minimum. This user only replied to like 3 comments on that thread and didn’t even offer any apology or reconciliation even though they claimed they were ‘owning’ the problem. Furthermore, people have been telling them what they need to change for months/years and yet they come to the table asking for feedback on what they can change? How about they listen to the feedback that’s already been given?!
Non-apology apology.
Right. Just want to say “we all said some things” without changing anything about their behavior. Like an abusive boyfriend they just want to say “I’m sorry let’s just go back to how things were” and then continue without changing any of the underlying problems
Which one is better for the IPO: listening to the community or listening to the money. Reddit are absolutely going to milk every dollar they can from this abusive relationship they have with mods and users.
Forum management 101
Lesson One:
1% of your readers produce 99% of your content.
Only about 1% of the population producing content is interested in enduring the shitshow of toxicity that comes with moderation.
Don’t piss them off.
End of Lesson
Honestly it’s amazing they even stayed around at all even before the site itself started fucking around. They start shit as a hobby, probably not even imagining it blowing up and becoming popular. Dealing with all the garbage and bullshit people on the internet have to offer. Then again, that’s thinking they made the community to have discussions; not control them.
Yeah - I ran a public forum as part of a publishing non-profit for about 12 years, so I’ve got nothing but sympathy for the mods.
Feel like telling a bit of what it was like, so here goes.
We got a fraction of the traffic Reddit did and the moderation was without a doubt the most difficult and least rewarding part of the effort - took up between 50% - 90% of our time, depending on how pissed off particular users were.
I finally gave up after the third wave of Turkish hackers (who were pissed that we had posted pictures of a broken window from a riot in Cyprus) hit us in a wave of spam accounts, ddos attacks, and finally hacked our shared service provider (I was soooo pissed about this, as I’d spend months hardening our site from their previous attacks, and I’d been relying on our hosting provider to have their backend secure) to hijack the website. I’m pretty sure they were Edrogan funded with a mandate, as the picture was really innocuous and their response to it was completely over the top. We were a small art & literature website. I can only imagine what mods on Reddit go through on a daily basis.
Just f quit, let it all burn. The problem is moderators often enjoy that little power & importance they have & are perhaps addicted to that a little. Am I wrong?
You might be right for some of them, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them enjoying a little power and importance, especially if it’s in relation to a community that they are connected with. But I agree with you that it might be a good idea to at least consider quitting, since it’s likely that Reddit is just going to get worse as it becomes increasingly controlled by dead-eyed shareholders.
If Reddit had just released a statement that was even just neutral like “Sorry, but we are monetizing our content now” instead of Spez’s ridiculously insulting bullshit, none of this would be happening now.
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That would have been a fantastic idea, tbh.
All they has to do was release. Press statement thanking the 3rd party devs, acknowledging their effort and contributions, and saying they are taking reddit in a new direction that precludes the third party apps.
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Spez is a shit expert. Of course he knows when things will pass.
Oh, more meetings will fix it! /s
I can understand the changes they make, obviously they must be pretty desperate for IPO and need to make the business viable. What I don’t understand is the absolutely terrible PR disaster that was the API changes announcement and the lack of any apology around that.
At this point, even if they backpedaled completely - even if they fired spez - it’s far too little and far too late. Third party apps are gone. The trust is gone. Folks like me deleted their content and their accounts. There is no going back.
Reddit search results are worse than useless now if you’re not signed into old reddit and have res installed. Google’s SEO problem is resolving itself. They have joined pintrest on my insite= exclusion list
Then why are they even still there? It’s like they’re so addicted to the small amount of irrelevant “power” they get from the position and they just can’t give it up.
I get that the tin pot dictator narrative is popular wrt subreddit mods, but it really isn’t a useful model for understanding people’s behaviour.
Fear of change, denial of loss, and sunk cost are all much more powerful tools for understanding.
Right, so you were a mod and you don’t like people calling out your behavior. Got it.
This ain’t a “narrative,” it’s my (and many many others’) personal experience with every mod that I’d encountered on that site.
I have never been a moderator, and your anecdote is not data. Your personal experience with a few people with toxic attitudes cannot be generalized, and the context of those experiences is vastly different from what’s currently being observed and discussed.
I get that you’re bitter that some stranger on the internet told you to stop doing something they didn’t like, and had the power to make you, but that doesn’t mean anything to anybody else.
If you think this is some unique point of view by someone who was spurned by a mod, or something, you know very little about reddit.
This is such a cynical take. Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of moderators do care about their subreddits or else they wouldn’t be volunteering their free time. The allure of the power to remove some random person’s post on the Internet, or to ban them just so they return with another account, pales in comparison to the thrill of watching your community grow and people having fun because of it. And it’s not this weird selfish, hey-look-at-me-I’m-so-successful kind of thrill, it’s like you joined this thing because you are interested it and now all these other people who are also interested in it are there talking about it. That’s what’s cool, you set off to make this place where people can talk about this thing that you think is cool and you get to watch it grow and be successful over time. Some of these communities have been around for over a decade, so, people have invested time and effort into them for over a decade.
Moving to elsewhere isn’t really as easy as people make it out to be. At the moment “moving communities” means fracturing your community as there is no unified approach to doing this.
The operative word being “unified” which is next to impossible to achieve. If you get all mods to agree you will have a hard time reaching all your users. This in itself presents the biggest roadblock, ideally you’d close up shop and redirect users to the new platform. Reddit will most certainly not allow this, their approach to protesting subreddits that were not even aiming to migrate made that abundantly clear.
So this means that, at the very least, you are looking at splitting your community over platforms. This is far from a unified approach.
This isn’t even touching on the lack of viable long term platforms out there. I’d love for people to move to Lemmy. But realistically speaking Lemmy is very immature, instance owners are confronted with new bugs every day, not to mention the costs of hosting an instance. That also ignores the piss poor state the moderation tooling is in on Lemmy. The same is true for many of the possible other “alternatives”.
All the new attention these platforms have gotten also means they are getting much more attention from developers. So things might change in the future for the better, in fact I am counting on it. But that isn’t the current state of the fediverse. Currently most of the fediverse, specifically Lemmy is still very much in a late Alpha maybe early Beta state as far as software stability and feature completeness goes.And, yes, the situation on reddit is degrading and this latest round of things has accelerated something that has been going on for a while. But at the same time Reddit is the platform that has been around for a decade and where the currenty community is. Picking that up and moving elsewhere is difficult and sometimes next to impossible. I mean we haven’t even talked about discoverability of communities for regular users.
Lemmy (or any fediverse platform) isn’t exactly straightforward to figure out and start participating in. If you can even find the community you are looking for. Reddit also hosts a lot of support communities, who benefit from reddit generally speaking having a low barrier of entry. Many of those wouldn’t be able to be as accessible for the groups they are targeting on other platforms.
Lemmy (or any fediverse platform) isn’t exactly straightforward to figure out and start participating in. If you can even find the community you are looking for. Reddit also hosts a lot of support communities, who benefit from reddit generally speaking having a low barrier of entry. Many of those wouldn’t be able to be as accessible for the groups they are targeting on other platforms.
This just feels like a cop out - welcome to the Internet, you need to search to find stuff? Maybe I’m terminally techie, or got online way “to early”, but my god, how did people get on reddit to begin with? It wasn’t a default homepage in a browser. How did they get an e-mail account? How did they find an ISP? Did they need counseling to pick a cell phone provider?
This feels just like the “Linux isn’t straightforward to …” - Ok? Neither is Android or Windows or MacOS. You just went through that at some point in the past and don’t remember the confusion.
And it’s not like Reddit started out with those communities. I mean, either you don’t care, or you care and hoping reddit changes is basically like being in an abusive relationship. Maybe try asking a techie friend if you really can’t handle a search engine and reading a small amount.
I mean, we’re not talking about setting up I2P to access an internal IRC network here, we’re talking about picking a website and getting an account. This should not be hard. And if you’re a mod fleeing reddit, maybe be the change you want to see and start a community on the fediverse.
I might be not getting something here but it just sounds like “All these people are trapped in a bad situation and I don’t believe they have any agency or ability to learn anything new to get out of it”. These people have agency. Instead of telling everyone “oh Lemmy is too confusing” - point them to the hundreds of posts and websites now explaining how to do it.
ok… breath… rant over.
Frankly, you are taking a too binary approach to the subject of your rant. There are tons of Lemmy instances, so figuring out the right one isn’t as straightforward as stumbling upon a single central platform.
This just feels like a cop out
No, I am just outlining several factors that come into play that do weigh in for people. I am not just saying it is difficult to find Lemmy instances. I am saying it is difficult to move entire communities over. I am also saying several other things than just “moving difficult”. To be honest, I highly suggest you go back and ready my comment again with the intent of seeing the nuance.
Then why are they even still there?
Sunk cost fallacy or misplaced hope are other options outside of Napoleon complex.
If you want to push back against the rising right-wing bigotry modding a decently sized subreddit might be one of the most effective places for regular people to do so. Arguably that power is not irrelevant in today’s social media landscape.
It’s easy to look at this from the lens of people just wanting power, but maybe it’s something akin to the grief, honest grief, I felt about leaving Reddit because I had been there so long as just a user. I can’t imagine how it would feel to give up control over something that I had created and curated for many years knowing that it was going to be destroyed. 
Yeah, I don’t get it either. I rather easily went through and deleted all of my posts and comments. It was quite freeing, really.
I also went through each sub that I moderated (solo, since I didn’t want to cause conflict with any co-mods or others) and both privated them and set them to NSFW. I did set the co-run ones to NSFW though and they haven’t been changed back yet, so I guess the others are okay with that.
And I have yet to receive any messages from admins telling me to change them back. I go and check my account every week or so. Nothing’s changed.
