Reddit has informed moderators of communities that are still private in protest that they will lose their mod status by the end of the week. Thousands of communities went dark earlier this month to push back on the company’s planned API pricing changes.
So they will reopen with the “malicious compliance” pictures of John Oliver or badly worded rules.
A week later Reddit will remove them anyway, because this is not a court or the fourth law of thermodynamics - Reddit can and will change any rules to keep the website running.
So the conclusion is: don’t even bother. If you care about the community, use your last few days as mod to immediately migrate to Lemmy. If you care about the title of mod… Well, good luck on this cursed website.
All the news about reddit over the last few days have made me realise that I no longer personally care.
I mean it’s still funny to read about the way subs are protesting, but I haven’t been on the site since the protests, and now I don’t get angry about the changes anymore. It’s a sign that I’ve finally kicked reddit out of my life after more than a decade on the platform.
I was leaving the site for a while, but the muscle memory to Sync was waay too strong.
Now I’m running Redact every day since Reddit keeps restoring old comments (at least some subs do).
I’ll build my new little corner here, and I’ll stick to it.
I personally just sorted my comments by top scoring and manually changed some of my top comments to random gibberish! That doesn’t get restored!
Just removing all mods isn’t really the answer. Mods have a purpose, removing them all will lead to chaos in some subs. The John Oliver pictures aren’t just malicious compliance, they are also a taste of things to come without mods. Maybe Automod can remove some of the worst stuff, but excessively posting flowers in a sub for cars is just as detrimental and is totally at the whim of the mods to follow up on this. Since this is all about money, I cannot see a professional moderation team in the books. Additionally professionalized content moderation is much more complicated for Reddit than it is for other companies like Facebook. They just have to check against their “community guidelines”, but Reddit has a lot of cases, where something useful in one sub can be despised in another. I’d like to know what the endgame is.
Once people realize what they can get away with, the REAL trolls, not the John Oliver sexy pics groups, but the joker types with a “watch the world burn” mentality will start making their home there.
Without community moderation or bot tools, it will be like trying to fight a tsunami with a tennis racket.