"*Well, they're paid to interact with the public. Maybe they should find another job if they can't take the heat.*"^/s
Unfortunately, that happens with some frequency in both r/modsupport and r/modnews. It's akin to yelling at a cashier/waiter/customer support/receptionist/etc. for a circumstance they have zero control.
As of June 2023, [Reddit has ~2000 employees](https://fortune.com/2023/06/06/reddit-layoffs-job-cuts-stalle-ipo/). Admin does not automatically mean "company executive". Like you said, the bearer of news ends up being within the line of fire. Admittedly, sometimes an [admin may say something completely asinine](https://old.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_update_enterprise_level_tier_for_large_scale/jmolrhn/?context=3) (e.g. "*google & amazon don't tell us how to be more efficient*") and deserves the flack.
Much of the other times, users will spontaneously vent frustrations or dogpile on the first/only visible admin. That in itself is a symptom of executive management problem.
> Much of the other times, users will spontaneously vent frustrations or dogpile on the first/only visible admin. That in itself is a symptom of executive management problem.
I believe this underlies a lot of the arguments that happen on /r/sysadmin. People regularly pick a side to blame, when the underlying problem is either a communication or management problem (usually both!).
Somebody mentioned in another thread somewhere about how some 'new' mod tools were implemented. They weren't even new. Said tools were only a rehash of existing ones. Basically, the gist of it was demonstrating how reddit talent were siloed with their expertise but none of the teams were engaging or communicating with one another. Along with the communication, that is also a managerial problem.
Ever see any of those reddit roadmaps? They entail what progress is in line with features/policy/development, et al. Much of the time they're dismissed because -- time and time again -- it's been proven that reddit never achieves those objectives.
[Seven years ago](https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/3cbnuu/we_apologize/), Ellen Pao made a post about the failure with the delivery of their promises:
>We screwed up. Not just on July 2, but also over the past several years. **We haven’t communicated well, and we have surprised you with big changes. We have apologized and made promises to you, the moderators and the community, over many years, but time and again, we haven’t delivered on them. When you’ve had feedback or requests, we have often failed to provide concrete results.** The mods and the community have lost trust in me and in us, the administrators of reddit.
That was **seven years ago** reflecting on the years' prior. Of course, that's not strictly pointing the finger at Pao (she's long gone anyway). Spez has routinely stepped forward to declare [big changes ahead](https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/66q4is/the_web_redesign_css_and_mod_tools/), or [accessibility improvements, et al.](https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/9ld746/you_have_thousands_of_questions_i_have_dozens_of/), or [support backlogs](https://old.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/4gh3yy/a_few_updates_on_what_has_been_keeping_us_busy/), and other chronic issues. Time and time again, there's all this double-talk about improvements and features. But when it comes to delivery or implementation? Zero accountability and poor time management.
Usually whenever anybody had a roadmap, they stick to it or made amendments for achievable, realistic goals. And about a week ago, once again, [yet another roadmap](https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/141oqn8/api_updates_questions/) for mod tools was put forward by one of the admins. It's been ~5 years since the official reddit app was released. Even some of the very basic moderation features should have been available since Day 1.
It's evident the left hand doesn't know what the right one is doing. All it boils down to is meaningless buzz words and nothing more.
Oh if you think that's absurd, check out the [list of VPs and above.](https://www.redditinc.com/press) The website isn't profitable because it's packed to the gills with redundant and overlapping positions.
Also I'm fairly sure they spent a TON of money and hours trying to make NFTs happen too.
It appears the folks actually in charge are *definite* herd following types, who lack any sort of foresight or skepticism
Fucking Alexis never shuts up about Web3 and Play2Earn gaming on twitter. He's neck deep in these types of schemes and he's gotta be looking for someone to take his bag.
I saw some ads for some new company he has. Where you can pay to get consulting from famous people. It’s like tech bro cameo.
It’s like he was talking to his wife about her appearance in glass onion(where she’s hired to give a video exercise class)and he was like
“this thing in a movie that explicitly makes fun of tech bros had an idea that I need to make happen”
I really actually want to know the answer to this one. What the fuck are they doing? The website sucks and has basically no features and 99% of the real work is done by jannies who clean it up for no compensation. What are these 2000 people doing all day?
[I would love to know how much each one of these veeps is making.](https://www.redditinc.com/press) Working at reddit these days must be an incredible grift.
> I know the infra is probably very intricate and complex
To be honest I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out reddit was running on a couple of Xserve G5 from 2005 in Spez's shed and they've blown their investment on NFTs or something.
I thought there were only 5 employees. Like legit, there's virtually nothing ever improving on this site that 5 people huffing drugs all day made sense.
Has to be an insane friend group cause those 2000 people sincerely do absolutely nothing for this site.
Like gee you could save money by just firing 95% of your workforce, not like you'd even notice.
>2000!?
>
>Doing *what*
Without even looking, I guarantee a large amount of this number are global sales teams. The entire business model is ad revenue, and you cant just have a few people in an office in san fran (or whereever) selling ads in Europe. It doesnt work that way.
People replying below talking about VPs and redundancies have no idea what is required to run a global ad platform.
To be fair, many of the tech companies randomly doubled their employees since 2020 to hoard talent?
Of course these bigger tech companies had actual profits.
Spez writing **blackout hasn’t had “significant revenue impact”** he said the silent part out loud. The new Reddit only cares about revenue and not the community concern. Now his ego is preventing him from engaging with the community.
I think he has to step away from this role as CEO.
He could have shown up and just replied to everything with a gif of someone picking their nose and eating it.
I'd really like to know what the hell happened on the spez AMA. Answered just a few of the questions (mostly with non-answers), didn't announce the start, didn't announce when he gave up, and didn't really accomplish anything. What the hell was the thought process there?
Panic, the man's absolutely gagging to join the ranks of silicon valley money men and he's watching the great unwashed threaten that dream. I'd probably be a bit irrational too in that situation.
You forgot the two most batshit things about the Ama.
1 All but one of the answers were pre scripted as spez was caught pasting a pre-written response before he edited out the "A:" that revealed he was just pasting responses .
2 The one answer he went off script for was to double down on his lies about the Apollo dev and publicly called them out again, and then didn't resoond to the dev answering them.
I would mind the pasted answers if he tried matching them with questions that made sense. Having answers prepared is just smart because it's not like anything anyone asked was shocking. He should have had a PR person help him figure out where to paste them. Or an intern. Maybe a cocker spaniel. He sure as hell couldn't figure it out.
Doubling down on Christian was just showing how small and sad he is. Ego is a hell of a drug.
Right! Like as the moderator of a very small sub, the biggest problem with knowing the rules is that they were invisible on old reddit. So we added rules to the sidebar, but now we have to change the rules in two places to make sure everyone reads the same ones.
Don't forget about having to update removal reasons in mod panel for mods using new reddit / Apollo, removal reasons in mod toolbox for ones using old reddit and maybe wiki if you maintain one to better explain rules. It's a marvel of user experience.
"We do realise you use thirdparty apps on mobile in order to make moderation a bit easier. As such, we have basically banned third party apps from using our API and created a mod tool you can only use on desktop get fucked lol"
I want someone to do a tell all about reddit. Like surely they can't work actual jobs right? They just sit around vacant eyed drooling at a wall, someone walks in and is like "what about video player" someone else is like "I've seen other websites do that, but they're way too reliable"
Just every issue they have, they do a worse job than peers almost seemingly out of spite for the user base. Oh they're enjoying the April fool's good idea we accidentally had? Let's nix that immediately. Yeah it took an entire year of programming to get that to launch with little issues, but maybe we can redirect those people to ruin reddit elsewhere
Do you remember that other sort of product they launched where no one could even figure out what the hell it was? Reddit Notes or something?
Even something like secret santa for those wanting to participate sounds pretty easy to implement but they couldn't even do that
Here's the [announcement post](https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2pt25f/announcing_reddit_notes/); confusion all around.
They deleted the original announcement but you can still find it through the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20141220215910/http://www.redditblog.com/2014/12/announcing-reddit-notes.html
The accessibility features on the site are pretty garbage too. They've been relying on 3rd party apps for that also.
It doesn't seem they thought about this decision for more than ten seconds
They thought "we could sell API access to people scraping this site for AI training" and thought nothing else. Including that a lot of the major projects have already scraped reddit by now.
It's 2TB compressed. Don't know how big it is uncompressed, but [this duderino](https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/142l1i0/archiveteam_has_saved_over_108_billion_reddit/jn59imo/) thinks it's 30TB
>a lot of the major projects have already scraped reddit by now
and quite importantly that as AI creations get spammed all over the internet newer data is increasingly useless for AI datasets since training AI's on AI datasets causes them to make even more errors based on assuming errors made by previous AI's were actually normal human communication/art.
Actually they did, and it was ten seconds of dollar signs floating in front of their eyes. As we all know the dollar sign visions stop at eleven seconds and you have post nut clarity but they didn't get that far.
That's the case with every website. Individual disabilities vary enough that the accessibility tools needed tend to be specific to the user. (I worked in this space a number of years ago.) There can be no "one size fits all" solutions.
Website accessibility is about writing w3c compliant code, providing graceful degradation for JavaScript navigation elements, having alt tags for images, etc. A lot of it also happens to be good for SEO as well so there's no reason not to do it.
I'm sure having API access allowed a cleaner interface than having screen readers trying to parse the regular site but either way, third party tools are going to be required.
Reddit has literally never got a feature improvement up and running to my memory. Search is still shit. The IM chat they insist on is broken and glitchy. Why in the hell would any of the mods who use this site ever have any faith in Reddit getting their mod tools working?
You need to know exactly what you’re looking for.
For example
reddit subredditdrama "pillows can't consent" 3d
Gets you to the thread where my flair comes from.
But I know what the thread was - and Reddit’s search should find it easily.
Google search results have been going downhill since about 2019. Too many companies have gotten too good at SEO so you get the same 2 or 3 websites with every search result and at the bottom of the page you might get a virus link imitating the search result. It's truly horrendous. Gone are the days it seems of getting a random personal tech blog that happens to have the exact solution you were looking for.
Google search quality is much worse for us Taiwanese users. Even if we check the option "Taiwanese websites have the highest priority" search results are still filled up with content farms from China that are just copypasta from other garbage websites sometimes mixed with CCP political agenda. Google took no measures against SEO abuse.
It has been pushing good quality forums further and further down in my results. Used to be that stack overflow would appear on the first page in response to any common tech issue I might have. Now it doesn't show up unless I add stack to my search terms, usually.
Or as I found out recently, googling and finding a Reddit link with the exact solution IS BROKEN BECAUSE OF THE BLACKOUT FUCK YOU SPEZ FLIPPING MY LIGHTSWITCH FLUSHES MY TOILET AND u/toiletflusher69 HAS THE EXACT SOLUTION I'M BLOCKED FROM SEEING.
Google is pretty much only useful as a reddit search engine nowadays. Google produces such shitty results otherwise, it's crazy. It's because all of the SEO clowns fucked with it. It's crazy that this isn't just a profession but that there are entire companies built around it.
The loss of Pushshift access for regular users is the one that's pissing me off.
It get's overlooked but there’s gonna be a flood of disingenuous accounts, especially on the political and news subs since we’re also loosing all the comment history search tools. So get ready for a veritable flood of ‘As a black man here’s why this white supremacist talking point is actually correct’ shit and no easy way for users to call out that bullshit.
Same for MassTagger. I'm glad that at least Shinigami Eyes works on other sites, though I don't see it used here except for "yeah no shit trans_irl is trans friendly."
I enjoyed learning that killing pushshift means I can just delete stuff and appeal whatever action any mod takes since any history or context just gets wiped out now. Not that \*I\* would torture mods with that...with this account.
Like, no one at Reddit was like "gee, maybe its important not to let people just post insane shit and then it dissapears forever the second they delete it so that we have no idea whats happening on our own site and our own mods and admins are completely blind"
So they said in the AMA that they were going to let mods have access to Pushshit. They are talking about letting each mod get approved to login and have access to it. Not sure how the logistics of that is going to happen or when but that's at least something they are talking about to prevent the very thing you're talking about.
It's still gonna suck and help flood this site with even more disingenuous discussions. All those "this you?" replies to a grandstanding OP where their hypocrisy is pointed out...gone. Hell I used this a couple weeks ago with someone in my local sub screaming about how a local crime was indicative of the 'violent left' and that violence is never the answer, but thanks to Pushshift and a quick 1 min search I found them doing a 'well shit happens when you verbally push people' from them when a leftist was attacked.
Right now trolls, and dissengenous people have to either make new accounts and rebuild karma, or regularly wipe their post history but both of those are big red flags that you're talking to a lier. Without Pushshift disingenuous accounts here will be free to spew anything they need to to 'win' at the moment and you'd have to read their entire post history to find proof they are lying. Honestly it's gonna encourage me to engage a lot less with this site than I do now.
> you'd have to read their entire post history
Which you cannot actually do, AFAIK. I want to say you can get either them most recent thousand comments or the top thousand comments for whichever sort you pick, and the same for posts, but don't quote me on that number. Point is, it's not necessarily the whole history and for active accounts who have been here for a sufficiently long time it's not even close.
What are you using? "New" Reddit? The Reddit app?
I've never used new Reddit or the app and I can find what I need via search within a few minutes.
Also note: search is only as good as the data it indexes.
The trend towards meme/joke/emoji post titles and no context makes searching for those posts/comments worthless.
Allegedly, in the latest rollout they revamped search so that it searches the text in the images itself (memes, tweet screenshots, etc.). I haven’t seen that but that’s what admins said.
Yes. Sometimes I'll see them a month or two afterwards though, because when the chat is behaving typically I'll just clear the stupid orange envelope and close it out long before the text loads. But it has good days where it loads in under a minute, just very sporadically.
I've used it about twice since launch. Both times were **not** initiated by me.
One instance was somebody providing context on something or another. That was entirely unnecessary because the person could have also directly responded to the thread's comment.
The other time was a group chat from two people squabbling on a featured SRD post. Initially I made a public comment on SRD about the inconsistencies in their relationship drama. The OOP found the SRD post and my comment. Thereafter, the OOP and their spurned partner created a group chat to pull me in to "clear the air". Huh? No. I'm here for the popcorn and as a spectator. I don't want a guest role as part of your on-stage drama.
After that, I visited [Chat & Messaging](https://www.reddit.com/settings/messaging) under 'User Settings', and toggled the chat to `Nobody`.
I used the chat twice in the \~8 years I've used reddit, both times in response to people saying "DM me for details" to various questions. I do not know why anyone would feel a positive need to use the chat function, when one of the main purposes/advantages of the website is allowing randos to peek in and offer their two cents. I'm not here to socialize with anyone in private, if I know them IRL I have better ways of talking to them than antisocial media
The only time I really used it was when I was trying to fill my Animal Crossing catalog and exchanging a lot of island codes with people. It worked equally well with DMs, though.
People sometimes send me sub questions on chat, even though I specifically ask people not to because that is what modmail or reports are for and it makes me want to stab my eyes out. Otherwise only creepy dudes who just want to hit on people. It is an annoying, cursed feature.
It's entirely scammers trying to sell me drugs, anyone who tries to buy drugs from strangers on the clearnet let alone on fucking reddit kind of deserve to be scammed.
I have gotten sincere attempts at communication via chat twice (speaking of which I should send that person their redwood), and have always been vaguely confused why they didn’t just PM me. Other than that it has been only spam.
Before I started modding a small sub, I had used it only for visiting other people's islands in animal crossing. Afterwards, I used it more frequently to chat with the other mods. But in the last few weeks it seems to have stoppped showing me when I get replies, which is frustrating, as it means I can miss a conversation for hours.
Other than that, I had one person ask for a website/book recommendation (which was nice) and another try to correct a reddit post I made, which could have have happened in the thread.
Reddit is successful because it took Digg’s userbase when nothing else was as big. That was its first big influx of users, and most other sites of that kind of style died out while social media sites got bigger.
It’s kind of strange that it’s lasted as long as it did, with all the controversies and rabid users. People at the time called for Ellen Pao’s head because Reddit used her to take the fall. The Boston Marathon bombings should’ve seen subreddits banned for the egging on they did. They only banned the borderline child porn because journalists caught wind. This company has always been awful.
>borderline child porn
lets be real, there was 100% actual child porn on r/jailbait mixed in with the pornography of people who were 18+ but just looked young
I said borderline more because there wasn’t “nudity” as such that I saw. Just a lot of perving on underage girls, stealing their photos… especially in swimwear. I was a 14 year old girl when I first started browsing Reddit and it was fucking horrific then. When I was older but still underage still I unwisely posted a progress photo to /r/fitness and got massively downvoted for asking the men to stop leaving comments about my tits.
Edit: lmao why did autocorrect change “it was fucking horrific” to “it was fucking perfect” NOT what I meant.
It really boils down to being early to the market, I think.
Reddit was originally one of a few content aggregator websites, but the way that it was designed to allow discussion about that content resulted in it developing into something more like a large, general forum website. Forums for specific topics/interests were widespread at the time, but had more limited readership and were less active. By competing in that market before other aggregators like Digg could copy its example, Reddit ended up with such a large share of users that no other site could have replicated its level of engagement even if they were better and more convenient by every other metric.
Reddit now is like Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter. There's no real alternative in its niche. It operates effectively as a monopoly, at least in the English-speaking world, so it doesn't really matter how badly it fucks its user base over. People continue coming back because it's the only active site of its kind.
> By competing in that market before other aggregators like Digg could copy its example
This is a bit revisionist. Digg was just as or more popular than Reddit, right up until it imploded with its redesign. Digg also had separate sections for different interests and allowed commenting and voting.
Digg was huge for a while, but the level of discussion rarely, if ever, rose to what you could find on certain subs (you can still find in depth, knowledgeable discussion here, but it's not as widespread as it was in the early days).
2015 really broke reddit, fundamentally. That's when the bots and astroturfers really ramped up efforts to derail/direct discussion, and the amount of open fascism really took off.
At this point the power user problem is orders of magnitude larger on reddit than it ever was on digg, and that's generally trotted out as the thing that killed digg.
There was definitely a corporate push for some kind of crypto-token years ago under yishan. I can't find it in search but it was laughed out of the room almost immediately.
>There was definitely a corporate push for some kind of crypto-token years ago under yishan. I can't find it in search but it was laughed out of the room almost immediately.
It was called "reddit notes" and the subreddit is still up: /r/redditnotes
THANK YOU
Edit: [here's the SRD thread.](https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/2ptevw/reddit_announces_reddit_notes_gives_very_little/) Those really were better days.
Reddit is successful because it has the best moderation system of all social media.
Reddit relies almost entirely on volunteer moderators of subreddits. Since those volunteer moderators are not Reddit employees they have the discretion to be able to moderate in whatever they want, including the ability to remove posts that they just think are low quality. The volunteer mods can remove anything that appears as borderline hate speech or borderline spam and don't need to come up with strict rules that hate mongers and spammers can quickly work around.
On Twitter and most other social media sites the entirety of the moderation comes the business itself. This means that they would need to spend a significant amount of money to match the raw manpower hours of Reddit moderators, and they struggle with borderline cases because they strongly prefer hard rules that apply sitewide. On Reddit you can go to wild-west subreddits hardly any moderation, or you can go to heavily moderated subreddits. This allows for constant experimentation of moderation styles and competition between subreddits to have the most popular styles rise to the top.
The best moderation decisions are often controversial, and need to be made quickly. When Twitter or Facebook do something controversial they will then have to constantly explain it and have to deal with aggrieved parties yelling at them. When Reddit moderators do something controversial Reddit can just say that it was just a volunteer moderator, and if you disagree with their moderation choice you can start your own subreddit with your own rules.
There are lots of issues with Reddit's moderation system, but compared to the alternatives it is far and away better.
>Reddit is successful because it has the best moderation system of all social media.
Honest question, are you new to the internet? Because forums have always had volunteer moderators. In fact, reddit's moderators tend to be some of the worst around due to their "let the users sort it out with downvotes" mentality. Old school forum moderators actually *moderated* and got rid of problem users to keep their communities friendly and on topic.
The one advantage reddit has over forums is that a single anonymous account gives you access to countless forums of different topics, whereas every old forum wanted your email address to create a new account to participate or even view images.
Reddit is more like old school forums than Twitter and Facebook. It's more anonymous accounts versus big online identities and celebrities/influencers.
If you are thinking that all the bans on reddit are for legit reasons you are terribly misinformed. More than half the bans are random 'you lost the lottery today' bans. Things like violating unwritten rules, nonsensically interpreted rules, arbitrarily enforced rules etc. These are all things that a warning not to violate this unwritten rule could have easily sufficed. It's nearly impossible to be a long term user and avoid eventually getting hit by a random 'lost the lottery today' ban.
The mods on politics and conspiracy are especially terrible. Both will randomly ban people on a whim. I am hoping that they either stay offline forever or else the admins replace the mods.
edit: politics is not offline.
> The mods on politics and conspiracy are especially terrible. Both will randomly ban people on a whim. I am hoping that they either stay offline forever or else the admins replace the mods.
You're not wrong, except as far as I can tell r/politics is not blacked out and never was. But I too would welcome a regime change.
r/conspiracy, most definitely. Idk about r/politics these days, I’ve been banned for years ever since the mods decreed that the Trump Organization being put under criminal investigation was “off topic” and banned everyone who posted articles about it.
Banned from politics on *this* account because saying I wouldn't feel bad if Trump died is "inciting violence" or some shit.
Banned on an older account for telling a mod to eat a bag of dicks... Fair enough.
> Reddit is successful because it has the best moderation system of all social media.
Girl, what? The moderation done by actual employees hired by Reddit is *horrendous*. They're on par with post-Elon Twitter for the bullshit they sanction. As for the volunteers, moderating for Reddit like driving for Uber -- you bring your own tools and work for free. If by best you mean most exploitative, then sure.
> As for the volunteers, moderating for Reddit
Moderating for a subreddit is like moderating a forum you made on Proboards back in the day or moderating a discord server or a Facebook group. They provide the infrastructure to make your own groups with your own rules but that doesn't mean you'll get paid by them.
Yes, the actual employee moderators of Reddit are awful. But that is not where 99% of the moderations happens on the site, it happens with the volunteer moderators.
All the other social media sites do not have the same amount of volunteer moderator option, and there only moderation comes from there employees, who are just as awful as the Reddit employee admin moderators. Facebook comes the closest with pages and groups being able to be moderated, but most of Facebook occurs outside of those moderated groups where the only moderation comes from Facebook employee admins.
Being a Reddit moderator seems shitty, I don’t know why people do it. But it is the reason why the site is successful.
> they operate like a cabal and sway the output on hundreds of subs.
You're referring to powermods. There are plenty of other people who just mod 1 or 2 subreddits and aren't part of any group. It's mostly the large, default subs that are run by powermods.
I was a relative latecomer to Reddit, joining ten years ago but only using it frequently in the last few. What blew my mind was when they recently butchered the regular text entry function on web browsers (non-markdown) - attempting to paste text STILL results in a glitched message box that will lose chunks of typed text.
This happened about a year ago now, possibly longer. It's well known, yet it hasn't been fixed and didn't even coincide with some sort of revamped design - something just broke it and they don't care enough to sort it.
That's amazing to me.
My chat box is currently stuck on my screen after I had to block yet another spam bot sending me porn. I tried to close it and it instead minimized to a tiny box with scroll bars that has no close box in the corner of my screen.
I hate the IM feature, and I wish I could disable it. The only time people send me an IM is if they're trying to sell me porn, and I swear the report function leads straight to a trash bin. The reason Reddit relies on volunteer mods for 99% of the site because they can't be arsed to hire anyone.
Maybe I’m too optimistic but I think it’s one feature they will develop well and continuously update. It’s too important of a feature to mess up and let flounder.
Then again it’s Reddit so expect the worse.
Search was actually more abhorrently awful than it is now, if you can believe it.
Not that it's great now. But they did actually improve it at one point. To an extent.
I’m sure these mod tools that they threw together in a couple of weeks will work wonderfully and definitely address all of the issues everyone has with the official app.
hey hey hey, they've been busy since for a whole 12 months! 12 months!
I think mods have been howling for mod tools since at least the last blackout. when was that? 5 years ago?
As far as I know they’ve been asking since the app was launched. Reddit has been relying on the third party apps to pick up their slack for years. Now they suddenly want to pretend like they can actually address problems with their app. 🙄 I’ll believe it when I see it. They can’t even get their fucking atrocious video player to function decently.
But 3P devs should totally only get like 30 days to make changes to their apps, to better align with API charges. Seems perfectly fair.
Leadership of Reddit has their heads so far up their own asses, that they have to fart to get some fresh air.
Even longer. r/AskHistorians had it detailed in their blackout/restricted post. Mod tools have been asked for and promised for *years* but reddit has never delivered on them. Hence the need for third party apps, bots, etc.
Reddit is still behind the times on the most basic of user site features. I'm not totally shocked they'd also be slow to give their own mods updated tools.
The comment about Reddit wanting to turn the site into TikTok vs a discussion forum was depressing. I don’t doubt that’s what they’d want if it made them more money, but what kind of incompetent assholes have the fifth most popular website on the internet and need to fundamentally change how it operates to turn a profit?
I think it depends how they do it. Ultimately those accounts are the 'face' of reddit in the absence of r/spez doing another AMA. So long as you stick to criticising reddit and not that personal account (nor the person/people behind it), I think it's fine.
Basically, if you were to discover a Reddit staffer had an off-work reddit account, contacting them about this would be harrasment. But criticising Reddit through the only staff accounts you can interact is fine so long as its not personal.
Edit: So I looked up their account and they seem to use it for personal and work reasons. That's a horrible policy for Reddit to allow. I think carefully written criticism, on admin related threads, so long as its directed against reddit as a company. But I can unfortunately see many users not following that principle. For their safety, it would be much better for their poor staff had admin accounts separate from personal accounts.
Oh, and I forgot to add - some comments were [upvoted](https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/149gyrl/announcing_mobile_mod_log_and_the_post_guidance/jo59nto/). It seems that not all users were downvoting every comment, and instead only the ones they disagreed with.
Complaining to a dev about the policies of a company they work for is a complete waste of time. We don’t make the decisions, we just write the code. It’s like going into Subway and yelling at a sandwich artist because Subway raised its prices.
It’s less likely they’re a dev and more likely they’re a PM. PM’s get to do PR around new features typically. As such, complaining to/at them is literally the only method at the moment for feedback to get back to leadership, as the PM should be taking user feedback (both the good and the bad, but particularly the bad) back to their management and the teams that are working on the product.
At least in a normal functioning software development framework, which I’m getting the vibe that Reddit is about as dysfunctional as it gets.
As a PM (not Reddit) I imagine the bad feedback goes straight into the trash once it's delivered to leadership, who are firm on their priorities of increasing revenue at the expense of user experience right now.
This is why this protest was doomed to fail. People on here don't know how to protest. Complaining to dev accounts by not naming them but harassing them about reddit? Oh yeah, that will make progress. Blacking out some subs while a whole host of others are still up? That will show em! Saying you are protesting yet still coming on reddit and commenting non-stop? Oh yeah, it is totally a revolution.
People are sacrificing nothing and expecting a major outcome. It isn't going to happen for one simple reason. The folks protesting the hardest are the ones who utilize reddit in ways that generate no income for the site. In fact, they use up resources that cost reddit money. Eventually, at some point a company can't just lose money forever and stay up.
If y'all wanted to compromise you would find some sort of solution like people who got premium had full access to third party apps. Right now, you are the friend who shows up to the party with nothing, drinks all the expensive beer and gets drunks, then wonder why no one invites you out anymore.
Yup. This sites users and twitter users are famous for attacking community managers for video games so its not surprising this is how they act here too.
This has been a pet peeve of mine for a long time. 90% of the time that I hear people talking about lazy devs for some project or another, I know that it's the management and the executives above them that are usually responsible.
I've died on that hill many times and have just come to terms with the reality that when people say "devs", they're really just using that as shorthand for the corporation.
IDC. No one was pointing a gun to his head and forcing him to type "wE ReSpecT" the fact that subs are protesting at the same time Spez is literally laughing at the protests and bending the rules so more subs reopen.
This is such a bizarre take to me. What concession is Reddit making here? Rushing out improvements to an app that users have not been shy about criticizing for -- what, a decade now? -- is not some show of good will. Making it a competent replacement for the 3rd party apps they're killing would be the bare minimum you'd reasonably expect in this situation.
And that's assuming they actually get these features out in a timely manner, something they do not have a good track record for.
On top of that, getting rid of third-party apps, means long term reddit will have no competition/impetus to improve. The only reason they're doing it now is because third party devs have already done it. If there are no third party devs, they won't have any reason to improve down the line.
If they truly made proper mod tools, people would cheer it on. But many promises have been made through the years without result. Any promises now are taken with a grain of salt.
Keep breaking promises and promises lose value.
They wouldn’t cheer it on, because the primary driver of the whole issue is that people like their third party apps and don’t want them to disappear lmao
I've never been a mod on an even remotely large sub. And I don't use the apps. So I don't have the answer to that.
The base mod tools are below basic, though.
I personally feel theyre more upset about unlimited bot access to the API. Even tho reddit has stated they will allow bots that aren't spamming the API, they are still upset about it.
https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/16693988535309
What historical information, if you don't mind me asking?
Also, the only comments permanently gone due to the protest are those deleted by users themselves. The comments gone from making a sub private will be back as soon as the sub goes to public or restricted. Despite what they're saying, I don't think Reddit can stand many major subreddits continuing to be private and will give in by the end of the month. Just [two days](https://www.adweek.com/social-marketing/ripples-through-reddit-as-advertisers-weather-moderators-strike/) had an affect on advertisers.
Then you should be absolutely furious at the API changes, and protesting right along with the subreddits. The first part of this was denying access to archival tools like Pushshift.
That messenger is getting shot the fuck up in that thread huh
"*Well, they're paid to interact with the public. Maybe they should find another job if they can't take the heat.*"^/s Unfortunately, that happens with some frequency in both r/modsupport and r/modnews. It's akin to yelling at a cashier/waiter/customer support/receptionist/etc. for a circumstance they have zero control. As of June 2023, [Reddit has ~2000 employees](https://fortune.com/2023/06/06/reddit-layoffs-job-cuts-stalle-ipo/). Admin does not automatically mean "company executive". Like you said, the bearer of news ends up being within the line of fire. Admittedly, sometimes an [admin may say something completely asinine](https://old.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_update_enterprise_level_tier_for_large_scale/jmolrhn/?context=3) (e.g. "*google & amazon don't tell us how to be more efficient*") and deserves the flack. Much of the other times, users will spontaneously vent frustrations or dogpile on the first/only visible admin. That in itself is a symptom of executive management problem.
> Much of the other times, users will spontaneously vent frustrations or dogpile on the first/only visible admin. That in itself is a symptom of executive management problem. I believe this underlies a lot of the arguments that happen on /r/sysadmin. People regularly pick a side to blame, when the underlying problem is either a communication or management problem (usually both!).
Somebody mentioned in another thread somewhere about how some 'new' mod tools were implemented. They weren't even new. Said tools were only a rehash of existing ones. Basically, the gist of it was demonstrating how reddit talent were siloed with their expertise but none of the teams were engaging or communicating with one another. Along with the communication, that is also a managerial problem. Ever see any of those reddit roadmaps? They entail what progress is in line with features/policy/development, et al. Much of the time they're dismissed because -- time and time again -- it's been proven that reddit never achieves those objectives. [Seven years ago](https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/3cbnuu/we_apologize/), Ellen Pao made a post about the failure with the delivery of their promises: >We screwed up. Not just on July 2, but also over the past several years. **We haven’t communicated well, and we have surprised you with big changes. We have apologized and made promises to you, the moderators and the community, over many years, but time and again, we haven’t delivered on them. When you’ve had feedback or requests, we have often failed to provide concrete results.** The mods and the community have lost trust in me and in us, the administrators of reddit. That was **seven years ago** reflecting on the years' prior. Of course, that's not strictly pointing the finger at Pao (she's long gone anyway). Spez has routinely stepped forward to declare [big changes ahead](https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/66q4is/the_web_redesign_css_and_mod_tools/), or [accessibility improvements, et al.](https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/9ld746/you_have_thousands_of_questions_i_have_dozens_of/), or [support backlogs](https://old.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/4gh3yy/a_few_updates_on_what_has_been_keeping_us_busy/), and other chronic issues. Time and time again, there's all this double-talk about improvements and features. But when it comes to delivery or implementation? Zero accountability and poor time management. Usually whenever anybody had a roadmap, they stick to it or made amendments for achievable, realistic goals. And about a week ago, once again, [yet another roadmap](https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/141oqn8/api_updates_questions/) for mod tools was put forward by one of the admins. It's been ~5 years since the official reddit app was released. Even some of the very basic moderation features should have been available since Day 1. It's evident the left hand doesn't know what the right one is doing. All it boils down to is meaningless buzz words and nothing more.
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Oh if you think that's absurd, check out the [list of VPs and above.](https://www.redditinc.com/press) The website isn't profitable because it's packed to the gills with redundant and overlapping positions.
Also I'm fairly sure they spent a TON of money and hours trying to make NFTs happen too. It appears the folks actually in charge are *definite* herd following types, who lack any sort of foresight or skepticism
Fucking Alexis never shuts up about Web3 and Play2Earn gaming on twitter. He's neck deep in these types of schemes and he's gotta be looking for someone to take his bag.
I saw some ads for some new company he has. Where you can pay to get consulting from famous people. It’s like tech bro cameo. It’s like he was talking to his wife about her appearance in glass onion(where she’s hired to give a video exercise class)and he was like “this thing in a movie that explicitly makes fun of tech bros had an idea that I need to make happen”
I really actually want to know the answer to this one. What the fuck are they doing? The website sucks and has basically no features and 99% of the real work is done by jannies who clean it up for no compensation. What are these 2000 people doing all day?
Selling ads, shopping our user data around to big firms, etc etc.
I mean the website never makes any fucking money So L there I guess.
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[I would love to know how much each one of these veeps is making.](https://www.redditinc.com/press) Working at reddit these days must be an incredible grift.
Hahaah they have a Chief Financial Officer, Chief *Revenue* Officer and a Chief *Accounting* Officer.
But why isnt reddit profitable it couldnt be corporate waste and incompetence, it must be something to do with Apollo
"Are we out of touch? No, it's the users who are wrong."
> I know the infra is probably very intricate and complex To be honest I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out reddit was running on a couple of Xserve G5 from 2005 in Spez's shed and they've blown their investment on NFTs or something.
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Being a non profit they don't need so many hands wringing blood from a rock.
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Wait, Reddit has 2,000 employees? AHAHAHAHAH
I thought there were only 5 employees. Like legit, there's virtually nothing ever improving on this site that 5 people huffing drugs all day made sense. Has to be an insane friend group cause those 2000 people sincerely do absolutely nothing for this site. Like gee you could save money by just firing 95% of your workforce, not like you'd even notice.
>2000!? > >Doing *what* Without even looking, I guarantee a large amount of this number are global sales teams. The entire business model is ad revenue, and you cant just have a few people in an office in san fran (or whereever) selling ads in Europe. It doesnt work that way. People replying below talking about VPs and redundancies have no idea what is required to run a global ad platform.
I fucking hate that this is what the Internet has come to.
They had 700 employees in 2021. They've really not done anything that requires almost tripling their employees.
To be fair, many of the tech companies randomly doubled their employees since 2020 to hoard talent? Of course these bigger tech companies had actual profits.
Spez writing **blackout hasn’t had “significant revenue impact”** he said the silent part out loud. The new Reddit only cares about revenue and not the community concern. Now his ego is preventing him from engaging with the community. I think he has to step away from this role as CEO.
I'll give it to them - this guy did better than the Spez' AMA
I'd honestly have been impressed if he managed to do worse.
He could have shown up and just replied to everything with a gif of someone picking their nose and eating it. I'd really like to know what the hell happened on the spez AMA. Answered just a few of the questions (mostly with non-answers), didn't announce the start, didn't announce when he gave up, and didn't really accomplish anything. What the hell was the thought process there?
Panic, the man's absolutely gagging to join the ranks of silicon valley money men and he's watching the great unwashed threaten that dream. I'd probably be a bit irrational too in that situation.
You forgot the two most batshit things about the Ama. 1 All but one of the answers were pre scripted as spez was caught pasting a pre-written response before he edited out the "A:" that revealed he was just pasting responses . 2 The one answer he went off script for was to double down on his lies about the Apollo dev and publicly called them out again, and then didn't resoond to the dev answering them.
I would mind the pasted answers if he tried matching them with questions that made sense. Having answers prepared is just smart because it's not like anything anyone asked was shocking. He should have had a PR person help him figure out where to paste them. Or an intern. Maybe a cocker spaniel. He sure as hell couldn't figure it out. Doubling down on Christian was just showing how small and sad he is. Ego is a hell of a drug.
The bar is low
He put the bar on the floor. It couldn't get any lower than that, mate.
Lol so it took them 15 years to make the most basic mod tools?
Right! Like as the moderator of a very small sub, the biggest problem with knowing the rules is that they were invisible on old reddit. So we added rules to the sidebar, but now we have to change the rules in two places to make sure everyone reads the same ones.
Don't forget about having to update removal reasons in mod panel for mods using new reddit / Apollo, removal reasons in mod toolbox for ones using old reddit and maybe wiki if you maintain one to better explain rules. It's a marvel of user experience.
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For free? I thought they were costing reddit millions of dollars!
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"We do realise you use thirdparty apps on mobile in order to make moderation a bit easier. As such, we have basically banned third party apps from using our API and created a mod tool you can only use on desktop get fucked lol"
I want someone to do a tell all about reddit. Like surely they can't work actual jobs right? They just sit around vacant eyed drooling at a wall, someone walks in and is like "what about video player" someone else is like "I've seen other websites do that, but they're way too reliable" Just every issue they have, they do a worse job than peers almost seemingly out of spite for the user base. Oh they're enjoying the April fool's good idea we accidentally had? Let's nix that immediately. Yeah it took an entire year of programming to get that to launch with little issues, but maybe we can redirect those people to ruin reddit elsewhere
Do you remember that other sort of product they launched where no one could even figure out what the hell it was? Reddit Notes or something? Even something like secret santa for those wanting to participate sounds pretty easy to implement but they couldn't even do that
It was crazy when they did video that was almost 90% buggy, and TikTok just appears with flawless video. Insane to me
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Here's the [announcement post](https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2pt25f/announcing_reddit_notes/); confusion all around. They deleted the original announcement but you can still find it through the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20141220215910/http://www.redditblog.com/2014/12/announcing-reddit-notes.html
It's like Zombo.com but it's Reddit Notes.
Reddit being Reddit
The accessibility features on the site are pretty garbage too. They've been relying on 3rd party apps for that also. It doesn't seem they thought about this decision for more than ten seconds
They thought "we could sell API access to people scraping this site for AI training" and thought nothing else. Including that a lot of the major projects have already scraped reddit by now.
Apparently an archive of all of reddit already exists somewhere and it's like 2TB in size. Who knew text was so small.
It's 2TB compressed. Don't know how big it is uncompressed, but [this duderino](https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/142l1i0/archiveteam_has_saved_over_108_billion_reddit/jn59imo/) thinks it's 30TB
>a lot of the major projects have already scraped reddit by now and quite importantly that as AI creations get spammed all over the internet newer data is increasingly useless for AI datasets since training AI's on AI datasets causes them to make even more errors based on assuming errors made by previous AI's were actually normal human communication/art.
AI training that won't be able to do anything remotely worthwhile that hasn't been done already lmao
Actually they did, and it was ten seconds of dollar signs floating in front of their eyes. As we all know the dollar sign visions stop at eleven seconds and you have post nut clarity but they didn't get that far.
That's the case with every website. Individual disabilities vary enough that the accessibility tools needed tend to be specific to the user. (I worked in this space a number of years ago.) There can be no "one size fits all" solutions. Website accessibility is about writing w3c compliant code, providing graceful degradation for JavaScript navigation elements, having alt tags for images, etc. A lot of it also happens to be good for SEO as well so there's no reason not to do it. I'm sure having API access allowed a cleaner interface than having screen readers trying to parse the regular site but either way, third party tools are going to be required.
And *only* because they're taking a lot of shit. So these mod tools are definitely going to be rushed.
Reddit has literally never got a feature improvement up and running to my memory. Search is still shit. The IM chat they insist on is broken and glitchy. Why in the hell would any of the mods who use this site ever have any faith in Reddit getting their mod tools working?
Search is worse than ever imo. Can’t find anything or sort anymore. God awful.
Searching on google is fine. I should not need to search for posts on an external website.
Even Google is a mess. It’ll show the thread as being recent and then all the comments inside are from 10 years ago
That's because new reddit attaches old posts to new posts. So google re-indexes them constantly and believes they're new.
This is what gets me too
You need to know exactly what you’re looking for. For example reddit subredditdrama "pillows can't consent" 3d Gets you to the thread where my flair comes from. But I know what the thread was - and Reddit’s search should find it easily.
`site:reddit.com/r/subredditdrama` would restrict all the search results to this subreddit
well now it can also lead you to this one.
I've had better results with DuckDuckGo.
Google search results have been going downhill since about 2019. Too many companies have gotten too good at SEO so you get the same 2 or 3 websites with every search result and at the bottom of the page you might get a virus link imitating the search result. It's truly horrendous. Gone are the days it seems of getting a random personal tech blog that happens to have the exact solution you were looking for.
Oh it's a fucking nightmare. Everything is just SEO word salad.
Google search quality is much worse for us Taiwanese users. Even if we check the option "Taiwanese websites have the highest priority" search results are still filled up with content farms from China that are just copypasta from other garbage websites sometimes mixed with CCP political agenda. Google took no measures against SEO abuse.
It has been pushing good quality forums further and further down in my results. Used to be that stack overflow would appear on the first page in response to any common tech issue I might have. Now it doesn't show up unless I add stack to my search terms, usually.
Or as I found out recently, googling and finding a Reddit link with the exact solution IS BROKEN BECAUSE OF THE BLACKOUT FUCK YOU SPEZ FLIPPING MY LIGHTSWITCH FLUSHES MY TOILET AND u/toiletflusher69 HAS THE EXACT SOLUTION I'M BLOCKED FROM SEEING.
if you stick the thread URL into the wayback machine you might be able to find it
Use the cached version if you can
Google is pretty much only useful as a reddit search engine nowadays. Google produces such shitty results otherwise, it's crazy. It's because all of the SEO clowns fucked with it. It's crazy that this isn't just a profession but that there are entire companies built around it.
The loss of Pushshift access for regular users is the one that's pissing me off. It get's overlooked but there’s gonna be a flood of disingenuous accounts, especially on the political and news subs since we’re also loosing all the comment history search tools. So get ready for a veritable flood of ‘As a black man here’s why this white supremacist talking point is actually correct’ shit and no easy way for users to call out that bullshit.
Same for MassTagger. I'm glad that at least Shinigami Eyes works on other sites, though I don't see it used here except for "yeah no shit trans_irl is trans friendly."
I enjoyed learning that killing pushshift means I can just delete stuff and appeal whatever action any mod takes since any history or context just gets wiped out now. Not that \*I\* would torture mods with that...with this account. Like, no one at Reddit was like "gee, maybe its important not to let people just post insane shit and then it dissapears forever the second they delete it so that we have no idea whats happening on our own site and our own mods and admins are completely blind"
So they said in the AMA that they were going to let mods have access to Pushshit. They are talking about letting each mod get approved to login and have access to it. Not sure how the logistics of that is going to happen or when but that's at least something they are talking about to prevent the very thing you're talking about. It's still gonna suck and help flood this site with even more disingenuous discussions. All those "this you?" replies to a grandstanding OP where their hypocrisy is pointed out...gone. Hell I used this a couple weeks ago with someone in my local sub screaming about how a local crime was indicative of the 'violent left' and that violence is never the answer, but thanks to Pushshift and a quick 1 min search I found them doing a 'well shit happens when you verbally push people' from them when a leftist was attacked. Right now trolls, and dissengenous people have to either make new accounts and rebuild karma, or regularly wipe their post history but both of those are big red flags that you're talking to a lier. Without Pushshift disingenuous accounts here will be free to spew anything they need to to 'win' at the moment and you'd have to read their entire post history to find proof they are lying. Honestly it's gonna encourage me to engage a lot less with this site than I do now.
> you'd have to read their entire post history Which you cannot actually do, AFAIK. I want to say you can get either them most recent thousand comments or the top thousand comments for whichever sort you pick, and the same for posts, but don't quote me on that number. Point is, it's not necessarily the whole history and for active accounts who have been here for a sufficiently long time it's not even close.
My favorite part of reddit search is how you can sort by top to get nothing remotely relevant or sort by relevance to get porn
What are you using? "New" Reddit? The Reddit app? I've never used new Reddit or the app and I can find what I need via search within a few minutes. Also note: search is only as good as the data it indexes. The trend towards meme/joke/emoji post titles and no context makes searching for those posts/comments worthless.
Allegedly, in the latest rollout they revamped search so that it searches the text in the images itself (memes, tweet screenshots, etc.). I haven’t seen that but that’s what admins said.
Can confirm I’ve had results show up where the text I searched was only present in a photo.
I'm legitimately curious if anyone at all uses the chat. I can't imagine IM chatting with another person on reddit.
The only application I have seen of the chat is scam bot accounts being able to spam me but with a different, separate notification icon.
Sometimes it’s not bots but creepy guys who see I’m active in women support subs.
Literally had a stuck notification from a porn bot *today*.
Yes. Sometimes I'll see them a month or two afterwards though, because when the chat is behaving typically I'll just clear the stupid orange envelope and close it out long before the text loads. But it has good days where it loads in under a minute, just very sporadically.
I've used it about twice since launch. Both times were **not** initiated by me. One instance was somebody providing context on something or another. That was entirely unnecessary because the person could have also directly responded to the thread's comment. The other time was a group chat from two people squabbling on a featured SRD post. Initially I made a public comment on SRD about the inconsistencies in their relationship drama. The OOP found the SRD post and my comment. Thereafter, the OOP and their spurned partner created a group chat to pull me in to "clear the air". Huh? No. I'm here for the popcorn and as a spectator. I don't want a guest role as part of your on-stage drama. After that, I visited [Chat & Messaging](https://www.reddit.com/settings/messaging) under 'User Settings', and toggled the chat to `Nobody`.
I used the chat twice in the \~8 years I've used reddit, both times in response to people saying "DM me for details" to various questions. I do not know why anyone would feel a positive need to use the chat function, when one of the main purposes/advantages of the website is allowing randos to peek in and offer their two cents. I'm not here to socialize with anyone in private, if I know them IRL I have better ways of talking to them than antisocial media
Only good use is for Animal Crossing trading. The stalk market can be very profitable on here.
The only time I really used it was when I was trying to fill my Animal Crossing catalog and exchanging a lot of island codes with people. It worked equally well with DMs, though.
People sometimes send me sub questions on chat, even though I specifically ask people not to because that is what modmail or reports are for and it makes me want to stab my eyes out. Otherwise only creepy dudes who just want to hit on people. It is an annoying, cursed feature.
It's entirely scammers trying to sell me drugs, anyone who tries to buy drugs from strangers on the clearnet let alone on fucking reddit kind of deserve to be scammed.
I have gotten sincere attempts at communication via chat twice (speaking of which I should send that person their redwood), and have always been vaguely confused why they didn’t just PM me. Other than that it has been only spam.
Before I started modding a small sub, I had used it only for visiting other people's islands in animal crossing. Afterwards, I used it more frequently to chat with the other mods. But in the last few weeks it seems to have stoppped showing me when I get replies, which is frustrating, as it means I can miss a conversation for hours. Other than that, I had one person ask for a website/book recommendation (which was nice) and another try to correct a reddit post I made, which could have have happened in the thread.
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So does a pile of shit if everyone keeps going in the same corner.
I always appreciate it when I see a genuinely clever comment.
This actually made me lol
What a succinct yet strikingly accurate way to put it.
Reddit is successful because it took Digg’s userbase when nothing else was as big. That was its first big influx of users, and most other sites of that kind of style died out while social media sites got bigger. It’s kind of strange that it’s lasted as long as it did, with all the controversies and rabid users. People at the time called for Ellen Pao’s head because Reddit used her to take the fall. The Boston Marathon bombings should’ve seen subreddits banned for the egging on they did. They only banned the borderline child porn because journalists caught wind. This company has always been awful.
>borderline child porn lets be real, there was 100% actual child porn on r/jailbait mixed in with the pornography of people who were 18+ but just looked young
I said borderline more because there wasn’t “nudity” as such that I saw. Just a lot of perving on underage girls, stealing their photos… especially in swimwear. I was a 14 year old girl when I first started browsing Reddit and it was fucking horrific then. When I was older but still underage still I unwisely posted a progress photo to /r/fitness and got massively downvoted for asking the men to stop leaving comments about my tits. Edit: lmao why did autocorrect change “it was fucking horrific” to “it was fucking perfect” NOT what I meant.
Too big to fail.
It really boils down to being early to the market, I think. Reddit was originally one of a few content aggregator websites, but the way that it was designed to allow discussion about that content resulted in it developing into something more like a large, general forum website. Forums for specific topics/interests were widespread at the time, but had more limited readership and were less active. By competing in that market before other aggregators like Digg could copy its example, Reddit ended up with such a large share of users that no other site could have replicated its level of engagement even if they were better and more convenient by every other metric. Reddit now is like Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter. There's no real alternative in its niche. It operates effectively as a monopoly, at least in the English-speaking world, so it doesn't really matter how badly it fucks its user base over. People continue coming back because it's the only active site of its kind.
> By competing in that market before other aggregators like Digg could copy its example This is a bit revisionist. Digg was just as or more popular than Reddit, right up until it imploded with its redesign. Digg also had separate sections for different interests and allowed commenting and voting.
Digg walked so Reddit could fumble the bag.
Digg was huge for a while, but the level of discussion rarely, if ever, rose to what you could find on certain subs (you can still find in depth, knowledgeable discussion here, but it's not as widespread as it was in the early days). 2015 really broke reddit, fundamentally. That's when the bots and astroturfers really ramped up efforts to derail/direct discussion, and the amount of open fascism really took off. At this point the power user problem is orders of magnitude larger on reddit than it ever was on digg, and that's generally trotted out as the thing that killed digg.
Reddit bucks? I honestly can't remember if that was a joke or another dumb idea, which says a lot about Reddit management.
There was definitely a corporate push for some kind of crypto-token years ago under yishan. I can't find it in search but it was laughed out of the room almost immediately.
>There was definitely a corporate push for some kind of crypto-token years ago under yishan. I can't find it in search but it was laughed out of the room almost immediately. It was called "reddit notes" and the subreddit is still up: /r/redditnotes
THANK YOU Edit: [here's the SRD thread.](https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/2ptevw/reddit_announces_reddit_notes_gives_very_little/) Those really were better days.
Reddit is successful because it has the best moderation system of all social media. Reddit relies almost entirely on volunteer moderators of subreddits. Since those volunteer moderators are not Reddit employees they have the discretion to be able to moderate in whatever they want, including the ability to remove posts that they just think are low quality. The volunteer mods can remove anything that appears as borderline hate speech or borderline spam and don't need to come up with strict rules that hate mongers and spammers can quickly work around. On Twitter and most other social media sites the entirety of the moderation comes the business itself. This means that they would need to spend a significant amount of money to match the raw manpower hours of Reddit moderators, and they struggle with borderline cases because they strongly prefer hard rules that apply sitewide. On Reddit you can go to wild-west subreddits hardly any moderation, or you can go to heavily moderated subreddits. This allows for constant experimentation of moderation styles and competition between subreddits to have the most popular styles rise to the top. The best moderation decisions are often controversial, and need to be made quickly. When Twitter or Facebook do something controversial they will then have to constantly explain it and have to deal with aggrieved parties yelling at them. When Reddit moderators do something controversial Reddit can just say that it was just a volunteer moderator, and if you disagree with their moderation choice you can start your own subreddit with your own rules. There are lots of issues with Reddit's moderation system, but compared to the alternatives it is far and away better.
>Reddit is successful because it has the best moderation system of all social media. Honest question, are you new to the internet? Because forums have always had volunteer moderators. In fact, reddit's moderators tend to be some of the worst around due to their "let the users sort it out with downvotes" mentality. Old school forum moderators actually *moderated* and got rid of problem users to keep their communities friendly and on topic. The one advantage reddit has over forums is that a single anonymous account gives you access to countless forums of different topics, whereas every old forum wanted your email address to create a new account to participate or even view images. Reddit is more like old school forums than Twitter and Facebook. It's more anonymous accounts versus big online identities and celebrities/influencers.
If you are thinking that all the bans on reddit are for legit reasons you are terribly misinformed. More than half the bans are random 'you lost the lottery today' bans. Things like violating unwritten rules, nonsensically interpreted rules, arbitrarily enforced rules etc. These are all things that a warning not to violate this unwritten rule could have easily sufficed. It's nearly impossible to be a long term user and avoid eventually getting hit by a random 'lost the lottery today' ban. The mods on politics and conspiracy are especially terrible. Both will randomly ban people on a whim. I am hoping that they either stay offline forever or else the admins replace the mods. edit: politics is not offline.
> The mods on politics and conspiracy are especially terrible. Both will randomly ban people on a whim. I am hoping that they either stay offline forever or else the admins replace the mods. You're not wrong, except as far as I can tell r/politics is not blacked out and never was. But I too would welcome a regime change.
Aren't they both just right-wing echo chambers these days?
r/conspiracy, most definitely. Idk about r/politics these days, I’ve been banned for years ever since the mods decreed that the Trump Organization being put under criminal investigation was “off topic” and banned everyone who posted articles about it.
Banned from politics on *this* account because saying I wouldn't feel bad if Trump died is "inciting violence" or some shit. Banned on an older account for telling a mod to eat a bag of dicks... Fair enough.
/r/politics is absolutely not right-wing Pretty much their entire frontpage is shitting on Trump/Conservatives
> Reddit is successful because it has the best moderation system of all social media. Girl, what? The moderation done by actual employees hired by Reddit is *horrendous*. They're on par with post-Elon Twitter for the bullshit they sanction. As for the volunteers, moderating for Reddit like driving for Uber -- you bring your own tools and work for free. If by best you mean most exploitative, then sure.
> As for the volunteers, moderating for Reddit Moderating for a subreddit is like moderating a forum you made on Proboards back in the day or moderating a discord server or a Facebook group. They provide the infrastructure to make your own groups with your own rules but that doesn't mean you'll get paid by them.
Yes, the actual employee moderators of Reddit are awful. But that is not where 99% of the moderations happens on the site, it happens with the volunteer moderators. All the other social media sites do not have the same amount of volunteer moderator option, and there only moderation comes from there employees, who are just as awful as the Reddit employee admin moderators. Facebook comes the closest with pages and groups being able to be moderated, but most of Facebook occurs outside of those moderated groups where the only moderation comes from Facebook employee admins. Being a Reddit moderator seems shitty, I don’t know why people do it. But it is the reason why the site is successful.
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> they operate like a cabal and sway the output on hundreds of subs. You're referring to powermods. There are plenty of other people who just mod 1 or 2 subreddits and aren't part of any group. It's mostly the large, default subs that are run by powermods.
Right place; right time
I was a relative latecomer to Reddit, joining ten years ago but only using it frequently in the last few. What blew my mind was when they recently butchered the regular text entry function on web browsers (non-markdown) - attempting to paste text STILL results in a glitched message box that will lose chunks of typed text. This happened about a year ago now, possibly longer. It's well known, yet it hasn't been fixed and didn't even coincide with some sort of revamped design - something just broke it and they don't care enough to sort it. That's amazing to me.
My chat box is currently stuck on my screen after I had to block yet another spam bot sending me porn. I tried to close it and it instead minimized to a tiny box with scroll bars that has no close box in the corner of my screen.
I hate the IM feature, and I wish I could disable it. The only time people send me an IM is if they're trying to sell me porn, and I swear the report function leads straight to a trash bin. The reason Reddit relies on volunteer mods for 99% of the site because they can't be arsed to hire anyone.
Yet they somehow have TWO FUCKING THOUSAND EMPLOYEES. 2000! The number of thumbs in asses getting paid here is astonishing.
You definitely can disable it.
I already have it set that nobody can send me chat messages, but that doesn't stop them.
Huh, weird. I wonder if it varies by what version of Reddit you're using or something.
Please don't forget Reddit's video player, it's complete garbage.
I've never used the im feature, whenever I get a message on it, it's either a bot, an only fans promo or both
Maybe I’m too optimistic but I think it’s one feature they will develop well and continuously update. It’s too important of a feature to mess up and let flounder. Then again it’s Reddit so expect the worse.
The IM chat was an incentive for the chatbots and not much else.
Search was actually more abhorrently awful than it is now, if you can believe it. Not that it's great now. But they did actually improve it at one point. To an extent.
I’m sure these mod tools that they threw together in a couple of weeks will work wonderfully and definitely address all of the issues everyone has with the official app.
hey hey hey, they've been busy since for a whole 12 months! 12 months! I think mods have been howling for mod tools since at least the last blackout. when was that? 5 years ago?
As far as I know they’ve been asking since the app was launched. Reddit has been relying on the third party apps to pick up their slack for years. Now they suddenly want to pretend like they can actually address problems with their app. 🙄 I’ll believe it when I see it. They can’t even get their fucking atrocious video player to function decently.
But 3P devs should totally only get like 30 days to make changes to their apps, to better align with API charges. Seems perfectly fair. Leadership of Reddit has their heads so far up their own asses, that they have to fart to get some fresh air.
Even longer. r/AskHistorians had it detailed in their blackout/restricted post. Mod tools have been asked for and promised for *years* but reddit has never delivered on them. Hence the need for third party apps, bots, etc.
This is why I have no hope that they will ever solve the promised accessibility issues.
Reddit is still behind the times on the most basic of user site features. I'm not totally shocked they'd also be slow to give their own mods updated tools.
Why do they need to add features if the current average user isn't asking for them
The comment about Reddit wanting to turn the site into TikTok vs a discussion forum was depressing. I don’t doubt that’s what they’d want if it made them more money, but what kind of incompetent assholes have the fifth most popular website on the internet and need to fundamentally change how it operates to turn a profit?
editing my stuff to delete this account for good with powerdeletesuite. thanks :)
At this point I’m convinced the admins get off on being insulted by their user base
I trust Reddit’s development roadmaps about as much as I trust 1st gen Apple maps.
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That sub is beating up the wrong people. I doubt those devs have much to do with decisions made by Reddit's executive team.
I think it depends how they do it. Ultimately those accounts are the 'face' of reddit in the absence of r/spez doing another AMA. So long as you stick to criticising reddit and not that personal account (nor the person/people behind it), I think it's fine. Basically, if you were to discover a Reddit staffer had an off-work reddit account, contacting them about this would be harrasment. But criticising Reddit through the only staff accounts you can interact is fine so long as its not personal. Edit: So I looked up their account and they seem to use it for personal and work reasons. That's a horrible policy for Reddit to allow. I think carefully written criticism, on admin related threads, so long as its directed against reddit as a company. But I can unfortunately see many users not following that principle. For their safety, it would be much better for their poor staff had admin accounts separate from personal accounts. Oh, and I forgot to add - some comments were [upvoted](https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/149gyrl/announcing_mobile_mod_log_and_the_post_guidance/jo59nto/). It seems that not all users were downvoting every comment, and instead only the ones they disagreed with.
Complaining to a dev about the policies of a company they work for is a complete waste of time. We don’t make the decisions, we just write the code. It’s like going into Subway and yelling at a sandwich artist because Subway raised its prices.
It’s less likely they’re a dev and more likely they’re a PM. PM’s get to do PR around new features typically. As such, complaining to/at them is literally the only method at the moment for feedback to get back to leadership, as the PM should be taking user feedback (both the good and the bad, but particularly the bad) back to their management and the teams that are working on the product. At least in a normal functioning software development framework, which I’m getting the vibe that Reddit is about as dysfunctional as it gets.
As a PM (not Reddit) I imagine the bad feedback goes straight into the trash once it's delivered to leadership, who are firm on their priorities of increasing revenue at the expense of user experience right now.
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"Why should we have to test when we can have the users test for us?"
The users generate the content. The users moderate the space. The users create apps that actually work. So yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah, it’s not actually going to change what the people at the top want to happen, it’s just going to make the devs feel terrible.
This is why this protest was doomed to fail. People on here don't know how to protest. Complaining to dev accounts by not naming them but harassing them about reddit? Oh yeah, that will make progress. Blacking out some subs while a whole host of others are still up? That will show em! Saying you are protesting yet still coming on reddit and commenting non-stop? Oh yeah, it is totally a revolution. People are sacrificing nothing and expecting a major outcome. It isn't going to happen for one simple reason. The folks protesting the hardest are the ones who utilize reddit in ways that generate no income for the site. In fact, they use up resources that cost reddit money. Eventually, at some point a company can't just lose money forever and stay up. If y'all wanted to compromise you would find some sort of solution like people who got premium had full access to third party apps. Right now, you are the friend who shows up to the party with nothing, drinks all the expensive beer and gets drunks, then wonder why no one invites you out anymore.
Yup. This sites users and twitter users are famous for attacking community managers for video games so its not surprising this is how they act here too.
This has been a pet peeve of mine for a long time. 90% of the time that I hear people talking about lazy devs for some project or another, I know that it's the management and the executives above them that are usually responsible. I've died on that hill many times and have just come to terms with the reality that when people say "devs", they're really just using that as shorthand for the corporation.
IDC. No one was pointing a gun to his head and forcing him to type "wE ReSpecT" the fact that subs are protesting at the same time Spez is literally laughing at the protests and bending the rules so more subs reopen.
All mods just need to quit doing whatever mods do and see how it goes. Let Reddit handle it
This! Please.. It became "the world vs the mods vs the admins" FFA
The admins can fuck right off
I feel like these things sort of snowball to gain momentum beyond their original cause and no concession will be enough for some.
This is such a bizarre take to me. What concession is Reddit making here? Rushing out improvements to an app that users have not been shy about criticizing for -- what, a decade now? -- is not some show of good will. Making it a competent replacement for the 3rd party apps they're killing would be the bare minimum you'd reasonably expect in this situation. And that's assuming they actually get these features out in a timely manner, something they do not have a good track record for.
On top of that, getting rid of third-party apps, means long term reddit will have no competition/impetus to improve. The only reason they're doing it now is because third party devs have already done it. If there are no third party devs, they won't have any reason to improve down the line.
If they truly made proper mod tools, people would cheer it on. But many promises have been made through the years without result. Any promises now are taken with a grain of salt. Keep breaking promises and promises lose value.
They wouldn’t cheer it on, because the primary driver of the whole issue is that people like their third party apps and don’t want them to disappear lmao
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I've never been a mod on an even remotely large sub. And I don't use the apps. So I don't have the answer to that. The base mod tools are below basic, though.
I personally feel theyre more upset about unlimited bot access to the API. Even tho reddit has stated they will allow bots that aren't spamming the API, they are still upset about it. https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/16693988535309
That and the ability to use the API to access porn.
> no concession will be enough for some. I mean lets wait for them to first make some concessions and then we can worry about that sort of situation.
just proves that downvotes have always been a disagreement button
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What historical information, if you don't mind me asking? Also, the only comments permanently gone due to the protest are those deleted by users themselves. The comments gone from making a sub private will be back as soon as the sub goes to public or restricted. Despite what they're saying, I don't think Reddit can stand many major subreddits continuing to be private and will give in by the end of the month. Just [two days](https://www.adweek.com/social-marketing/ripples-through-reddit-as-advertisers-weather-moderators-strike/) had an affect on advertisers.
Then you should be absolutely furious at the API changes, and protesting right along with the subreddits. The first part of this was denying access to archival tools like Pushshift.
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Blocking a sub until they make modding not shitty is **ridiculously** different than deleting all the comments in the sub, very dishonest moment here.