Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge
Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge
Concerns of Redditor safety, jeopardized research amid new mods and API rules.
Concerns of Redditor safety, jeopardized research amid new mods and API rules.
Did you know that improper food canning can lead to death? Botulism—the result of bacteria growing inside improperly treated canned goods—is rare, but people can die from it. In any case, they'll certainly get very ill.
The dangers of food canning were explained to me clearly, succinctly, and with cited sources by Brad Barclay and someone going by Dromio05 on Reddit (who asked to withhold their real name for privacy reasons). Both were recently moderators on the r/canning subreddit and hold science-related master's degrees.
Yet Reddit removed both moderators from their positions this summer because Reddit said they violated its Moderator Code of Conduct. Mods had refused to end r/canning's protest against Reddit and its new API fees; the protest had made the entire subreddit "read only." Now, the ousted mods fear that r/canning could become subject to unsafe advice that goes unnoticed by new moderators. "My biggest fear with all this is that someone will follow an unsafe recipe posted on the sub and get badly sick or killed by it," Dromio05 told me.
Reddit's infamous API changes have ushered in a new era for the site, and there are still questions about what this next chapter will look like. Ars Technica spoke with several former mods that Reddit booted—and one who was recently appointed by Reddit—about concerns that relying on replacement mods with limited subject matter expertise could result in the spread of dangerous misinformation.
I’d just like to say fuck Reddit.
Reddit sucks.
Consider ritualistic suicide of your old account
https://old.reddit.com/r/redditseppuku/top/?sort=top&t=all
I’m doing this. It  it sucks because there’s a wealth of knowledge there, but I’d rather get it someplace else and I feel guilty every time I go there,  and I was a digg refugee when they fuck their old site so I’ve been through this before.. Forces change so at least there’s that.
And /u/spez. Don’t forget that shit head.
I mean, what were they expecting to happen? Reddit made it very clear they would remove moderators who kept subreddits closed.
Hey — one of the mods mentioned in the article here.
The idea was that if enough subreddits banded together and shut down, we could have brought Reddit to the negotiating table and helped to save the 3rd party apps so many of us relied upon for our daily Reddit experience.
Unfortunately, it seems that way too many mods preferred the sense of control they had over their communities rather than what was right or just. All those subs that went public again after 48 hours, and all the other ones that went public again but with protest content killed all momentum the protest had, and doomed it.
The part all too many people miss is that Reddit is like an iceberg on the ocean — while frequent visitors see the new content at the top, it’s the huge mass of old content that brings Reddit the bulk of its revenue. It’s all that old content that is indexed by Google and which shows up towards the top of Google search results — and during the shutdown, all of those links were broken. Google even took note during the protest that a significant number of search results were leading to broken links.
This look was terrible for Reddit, and hit them directly in the pocketbook. But then some mods decided they didn’t mind being bent over a barrel by Reddit so long as they could put “moderator” on their resume and reopened too soon. The subs that went with John Oliver content were droll, but also reopened the huge mass of content that lies beneath the waves and which Google indexes into. Reddit didn’t lose anything from those subs.
I was fully expecting to be turfed. I pretty openly dared Reddit to do it. After the shit they pulled I wasn’t going to go back and do free work for them on their terms. I forced them to be the bad guy. We had to show people how Reddit was treating its volunteer moderators, and in the end they didn’t disappoint.
In the end, for me, I chalk this one up as a win.
Good for you! I was mod of a tiny gaming sub, and 99% of its members did not care the least tiny bit about Reddit. They will when it comes for old-Reddit, but the "first they came for..." argument did not manage to penetrate their shells, especially as they were involved in multiple subs and those all stayed behind intact as well. So like 4 of us started a new community here... where we have maybe 1 post a week instead of 1 per hour. Even that much is inordinately complicated by all the bugs on Kbin/Lemmy, where ~80% of the time when you want to upvote or boost it asks you to re-login (actually it's ~100% after a certain threshold of time is reached, or 0% if you instantly do it without taking time to read or write anything first, but that is not normal behavior!), and my notifications have been permanently busted for weeks now due to a bug where if you comment on a post that a mod later removes, the notification of someone responding to you has no way to ever be removed or even seen, ever again. So what I am saying is... I really cannot even so much recommend that they come here, just yet? I am a techie person and can patiently deal with these things, but most of them are not, and won't.
But you cannot control them. You can only control yourself. Which you did? Thus, good for you! YOU at least did the right thing. Maybe others will follow your lead, especially as the software gets better (Kbin in particular is more in its infancy than Lemmy - like iirc it even has zero moderation tools right now!?), or maybe they will not, but that again is on them. You at least showed them the way.
They were hoping Reddit would blink first. Unfortunately, it's easy to find people who don't know or don't care about the changes. So, Reddit cans any mods who don't play ball. Maybe it will have a long term effect, maybe not.
They caused these problems themselves... let em rot in it.
Sure, but users dying don’t impact Reddit’s valuation in a direct fashion, or the payout /u/spez is gonna get, so long as they can sandbag any potential legal issues long enough that they become the new owner’s problem. And money’s all they care about.
We will continue to be profit driven until profits arrive.
u/spez
money
=> short-term profits, ftfy
When asked for comment, Reddit's director of corporate, policy, and safety communications, Gina Antonini, said via email:
Sounds like none of my problem, tho it sure would suck to be you, bi!ches! (essentially)
"Reddit" is dead. It remains to be seen what, if anything, will replace it. e.g. where did those exact mods go, who were mentioned in the article? A Fediverse location, if they can stand all the bugs here? Or nowhere, if they were too shaken to want to devote their time to some other place? Or will they go back even, seeing >95% of their communities refusing to leave Reddit (until it literally kills them of botulism ofc)? Only time will tell...
I'm one of the mods mentioned in the article (Dan) and yes, I'm here. Been talking (well emailing) with Scharon for a number of weeks now. I'm highly unlikely though to become a mod again here or anywhere. I just don't think I can handle it again to be honest. I'll continue to contribute where I can with advice but my mod days are likely past.
EDIT: For those that didn't read the full article, I was a mod of /r/homeautomation which is discussed further down. I was not, nor was ever, associated with /r/canning. Just wanted to make that bit clear. :)
Just wanted to chime in as another mod mentioned in the article who has been communicating back and forth with Ms. Harding over the last few weeks. I’m also burnt out on the idea of being a mod again. It’s just not worth it, especially when I have so many other things to occupy my time with.
As someone with no interest in canning whatsoever, I just want to thank you and your fellow mod below for contributing your niche expertise and no doubt enormous amounts of time and passion to the internet.
People call modding a thankless task, and at times like this it must surely feel that way, but countless people will have silently thanked you as they benefitted from your expertise and willingness to share it freely. You represent what humanity and science and education should really be about, for that I deeply appreciate your efforts.
Thank you so much for your service. I was a mod of a tiny gaming sub and so got only the barely taste of what you must have experienced daily. In my case we argued endlessly (& unfortunately sometimes toxically) which game mechanics are "better" to take advantage of,
while you are over there dealing with literally potential life-and-death situations!(edit: oh, well it at least is true for some mods, even if not you, but I still thank you for all your efforts nonetheless!:-P) (I hoped that during a pandemic I was at least helping people deal emotionally with being indoors all the time, plus just in general trying to encourage good behavior within society, but it is nowhere near the same I am sure:-P) I can only imagine the stress you had to go through here during the fall of Reddit, but I do not have to imagine that feeling of burn-out: most mods actually who really truly care about their communities only last a handful of years if that (I think I read somewhere that the average was like 1-2 years).You deserve peace, and maybe you'll find some other way to contribute to your community - in fact you definitely will, though it may not be on the internet next time:-). Also, I noticed that a lot of the stressful situations I encountered were due to Reddit changing its nature YEARS before Huffman did this recent fiasco - it encouraged people to speak rather than listen, e.g. to perhaps ask for recipes rather than do a search for pre-existing ones. An additional post = an additional metric to count and potentially an additional advertisement to display, while a search showing "canned" results (hehehe pun intended:-P) did not gather them as much profit, but then the former added to your workload whereas the latter would not, so a great deal of the problems that mods faced were issues of Reddit's own devising, I think. At least in quantity if not in quality.
But also in quality too b/c it changed the very focus away from finding facts and towards encouraging the lonely to speak with others, in a manner in which "facts" can take a backseat to that human connection... which can get some people killed in the process.:-(
So I definitely understand why you would want to distance yourself from all of that. Me too. The need will be met in some other way - maybe via books, magazines, or websites with only vetted authors allowed, or perhaps with disclaimers added to every submission, and maybe a paid curation staff, or even AI tools scanning for common misinformation specific to that genre, I don't know. But in any case, I did want to thank you for your own efforts. I have no interest in any of those communities so never once went to any of those, but I do like to see people volunteering their time to help other human beings:-).
I was the sole mod of /r/skin until I got warned about the subreddit being private in protest.
I originally took it over because it was 100% spam and scams and the previous mod hadn't been on Reddit for years. It took a year before the spammers gave up. When I left I turned off the automod and the spammers will return. So much for trying to build a helpful space.
it's possible that nothing replaces it, as that area of the internet is just gone
I still browse Reddit whenever I feel like I hate myself and need to repent by subjecting myself to endless OF thirst traps, bots, anime porn, and fucking lame-ass, trite-ass jokes. Which is to say, fuck Reddit, I haven’t been there since they killed Apollo. Oh, and I have it on good authority that spez fellates his mom on the regular.
Plenty of anime porn on Lemmy. You can at least get that here.
Burggit.moe is where a lot of the anime porn subs left for
I block a Reddit like community, because I don't care about Reddit. Now I'm seeing the same news article here. Don't you guys have anything better to post than reddit?
A content filter for the word "reddit" might be worthwhile for you. It's a feature I use in sync, but I'm sure other apps also support it.
"My biggest fear with all this is that someone will follow an unsafe recipe posted on the sub and get badly sick or killed by it," Dromio05 told me.
But u/spez's cash and prizes are more important than this.
They don't care about the collateral damage, whether it's Elon Musk or Trump or the lemur boy.
The NFL reddit sucks now. My less geeky friends who don't give shit about lemmy have commented on it.
I can proudly state that I have not logged on to Reddit since their API shenanigans. I am better off due to that.
If I need any info from the site, I just use RSS. Plus the censorship on reddit that created crazy echo chambers in many subs was suffocating.
"My biggest fear with all this is that someone will
follow an unsafe recipe posted on the sub and get badly sick or killed by ittake the internet seriously and hurt themselves in the process," I think that is beyond your power.You never look up tutorials?
I mean, Reddit deserves to be punished, and there are many reasons to be upset (I personally shredded all my contributions and deleted my account in protest), but I kinda feel like the canning safety issue might be overblown. Nothing is stopping them from staying and calling out unsafe recipes with comments/in association with the new moderators. Sure, they have to go through the new mods to fully remove things, and their removal in the first place raises significant ethical questions, but calling this a safety issue because "someone else could get it wrong" seems like they're reaching.
Hey — one of the former mods of r/Canning here.
I don’t want to see people get sick, and I don’t want to see people die from what usually amounts to less than $5 worth of home canned food.
But that doesn’t mean I’m now bound for eternity to Reddit to help ensure they don’t hurt anybody. That only helps Reddit. After what they put us through I’ve stopped any and all contributions to their ungrateful website.
Nor does it mean I have to stop criticizing Reddit for choosing questionable mods to replace us.
Thanks for taking the time to respond, even though I was critical! Sure, I have no disagreement with anything you said in your reply. I'm also involved in hobbies where bad information can hurt people (including canning and foraging for mushrooms), and I'm obviously against knowledgeable people being removed from positions of authority in these communities. This post bolds the text about being worried that new mods may miss something that the old mods wouldn't, which could lead to someone getting hurt. I saw that, and that a couple of early comments latched onto it as a focus. I had broccoli in a wok that I needed to get back to and just fired off a quick comment as a bit of infernal advocacy that the replacement of mod powers probably isn't as dire as the quote makes it sound.
It is not. The mere fact that someone is likely to get some info wrong is not a fact that is in question, only the likelihood of its occurrence is, and quite frankly neither you nor I are qualified to know how often such posts were submitted and rejected, but I have a hunch that the former mods of those exact subs just might?
It reminds me of the story where a guy was fired b/c he refused to lie and state that the train wheels were okay when in fact they were overheating (this was in the USA but probably similar stories happen in most countries, so really is much more broadly applicable). This was back in February of this year iirc. Now we know that many people have died as a result of derailments since then - and potentially worse yet, some will suffer illnesses for an entire lifetime and extremely possibly (even likely, even certain if I am not mistaken) for another generation or few from now, as a result of the carcinogens released into those areas.
Again, for emphasis: NOW we know that, but even back THEN, it still would have been a true fact that "train derailments are more likely than they were in the past, b/c of the reduction in safety controls". We did not need to wait for people to die to be able to believe that, it was always true, and imagine a wonderful world where nobody at all had to die, b/c having seen the reduction in safety controls, someone acted and placed new controls in place that prevented it.
The fact here is that info obtained from Reddit is less "safe" than it used to be. Hopefully nobody has to die to prove that conclusively. Ofc all info on the internet should be subjected to scrutiny, but not everyone is so cautious, and moreover, "transitions" especially can be harsh, i.e. from a resource (e.g. a particular sub) that had developed an EARNED reputation for providing only safe info, to now where the sub has the same name, but has a totally different internal structure, with fewer to no safety controls inside.
That is my two cents anyway, fwiw.
Mod of /r/homeautomation here (mentioned in the article as "Dan") and yeah, you pretty much nailed it. In our case the biggest concern was amateurs working with electricity. The "which wire is which" posts were often greeted with a "black hot, white neutral" response which on the surface is generally correct. However, there are lots of cases (especially in houses older than say 20 years) where that can be wrong and dangerous. It's further complicated by the fact that multiple live circuits can exist in the same box so even if you killed power to the light you are working on the box may still have live wires.
As with canning, homeowners dying from electrocution is rare, but it doesn't negate the danger. I'll wire shit hot all the time (much to my wife's annoyance) but I've been doing this for years and with lots of guidance and supervision. I will also very much KNOW what's hot and what's not both through a no-contact probe and a voltmeter. Electricity isn't something people should be messing around with if they don't have at least a basic understanding.
I've rambled long enough, lol. Funny enough, I also live in the state where the train derailment happened in February (though I was nowhere near it).