Submitted 2 weeks ago by vegeta@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
At the risk of agreeing with Reddit:
Under new rules rolling out over the coming months, a small number of users will be required to leave some of their moderator posts so that they aren’t moderating more than five subreddits with 100,000 monthly visitors.
That sounds perfectly reasonable. Reddit has a massive powermod problem.
Given Reddit’s past unreasonableness, I wouldn’t be surprised if this otherwise reasonable explanation has an alternative motive.
The motive is these mods hold a decent amount of power on the platform that they wish to reduce. They don’t want a repeat of the API protests.
Gotta boost user numbers.
Or obscure them considering not letting people see sub count only daily/weekly activities
True, but Reddit let this problem fester for a long time.
What's interesting to me here regarding this, is Reddits current preparation timescale. This isn't going to be enforced until March 31st, 2026. This tells me that Reddit would have been unprepared for a complete mass-walkout of community moderators during the 2023 Reddit API strikes. A large chunk of Reddit during that period was genuinely inaccessible. But after a few token gestures and a few examples made of some especially rebellious mod-teams, most of the striking moderators returned.
A huge opportunity was missed by people running major communities to functionally degrade Reddit in at least the medium-term as a website. You can't just hastily promote random people to replace moderators Reddit is either forced to remove or who leave voluntarily. The average person is likely too lazy, too arbitrary and too corrupt to effectively oversee communities of notable sizes.
The quality of reddit took a massive hit after the strike and never recovered.
I was on one of those “especially rebellious mod-teams”. We were even interviewed by Ars Technica about it all at the time.
On advice of a majority of our users, we took our sub offline and kept it that way until Reddit booted us as mods. Honestly, this was the outcome I was expecting — hell, I was pretty open about goading them into it. What was the alternative — to cave to the platform that was abusing us so I could keep working for them for free?
That’s the part I didn’t understand about my fellow mods from other subs. Many of them caved pretty quickly. Their identities seemed to be so tied up in being a Reddit mod that they couldn’t let it go, even though the relationship was obviously very unequal. Too many other people stood up after witnessing the mod abuse to take over from those who got the boot, just asking for the Reddit boot to be applied to their necks instead.
Well, I wish all the mods the kind of treatment they forgave/ignored the last time around.
actually, thier purges since the election was too effective, and removed so much users and mods by banning them. plus the shadowbans have dramatically increased, because they made the filters to sensitive to "potential bots/spammers)
That was my reaction too. I don’t feel like digging in to see if it’s actually bad though. Not gonna affect my life.
Its probably related to the whole paying users thing.
We all presume that being the mod of several large reddit communities doesn’t include the possibility of sidehustle financial benefits.
Yet, humans are innovators of corruption! And I can only assume that any multi-mega-subreddit moderator has worked out something to make what is obviously a full time job worth their time.
I heard mods of big subreddits can get basically sponsored by big companies and go to events. Half the pc gaming subreddits have what are basically ad posts pinned by the mods.
It could be viewed as reasonable if viewed alone. I think that its fine and could make a lot of sense for control over their platform.
The history of reddit sheds a different context in my mind though. Mods are volunteers. Subreddits were established to moderate themselves, implementing nuanced rules for their specific topics that might differ from other subs that need completely different rules and approaches. Its part of what made reddit unique compared to alternate sites.
Then they made moderating much more difficult by eliminating third party apps. Then they started implementing their plans to take the platform where they wanted it, which is fine because its their platform, but they wanted all their mods to do a bunch of work and in a certain manner to make it so. Very demanding on free labor.
So there’s mods still around and they want to restrict them more? Who knows, maybe that’s a great idea but they made the mess they’re in. This decision isn’t a single on on its own, its part of a stack of them.
The problem with powermod isn’t that they exist, though. Moderation of a large sub is still done by volunteers that have had to hack solutions together because they don’t get a lot of support from Reddit. It helps Reddit to have experienced mods overseeing several subs because they bring with them experience on how to handle high profile and large scale moderation efforts. They are a technical talent pool that Reddit relies upon a lot.
The problem is that Reddit has shitty mod governance. It still uses rank by add date and offers no ability for users to kick a mod out except for TOS faults. Reddit doesn’t want to fix mod governance issues because it creates a legitimate mod power structure and Reddit doesn’t want to give that much power to users, including mods.
That said, Reddit’s shitty mod governance was copied directly to Lemmy.
Not really. The powermods arent bringing anything unique moderation except a network that allows them to control content for a specific audience. This is not about enforcing subreddit rules its about subreddit mods pushing an agenda across their subs and pushing sponsored posts outsides reddits ad program.
Its overall a good thing but the powermods will be replaced with reddit admins doing the ame
Yeah. I mean, I remembered seeing someone named awkwardturtle on there and they moderated like some 30+ subreddits? That's ridiculous.
Users like that should not have that much power.
Yes, but they are also doing this to deleverage their mods and consolidate censorship power with coporate
admins actually are the one that hold all the power on the site, mods are the plebs that have to play ball. admins are only 2nd in power to spez. they are the ones behind the aggressive somewhat indiscrminate shadowbans and purges
It would have made sense if done years ago. Doing it now is suspicious.
reddit might want AI to control some of the subs, dont you think?
This was desperately needed.
But I’m not convinced they aren’t just going to make alts.
The best way to leave reddit is to get permabanned.
lol can confirm
Yes, I expressed outrage at a disgusting state sanctioned murder in Iraq and suggested the invaders perpetrating these horror deserve to see the same kind of violence in their own cities. Permaban of the entire website forever. I could easily evade the ban but, this was also when the API trouble and the “reddit is fun” app stopped working. The writing was on the wall, duck that place and everyone in it. I won’t be taken hostage anymore.
I never looked back and I’m glad I did, I was wasting so much of my precious time in that ducking disgusting dump. I hope Lemmy doesn’t Septemberify for a long time. I really hope steps are taken to prevent centralization and owner dominance of Lemmy before it becomes reddit with extra steps
Lenny doesn’t really work like that. It’s not just one site.
on many the large subs, you can get ban for overreporting to.
Id go back just to try and get banned again. I’ve tried everything I can think of. Always get shadow banned right away.
Can confirm. You can have the mildest takes and still get permbanned.
Did you know, that saying Neo-Nazis should be named and shamed is a permbannable offense?
Reddit is becoming Xitter 2.0 and I’m really hoping the remaining human users on there figure it out soon.
actually since reddit start scrutinizing new accounts and old accounts, you dont even need to cmment to get shadowbanned. thier AI just assume “sudden activity from a new or old account, is consider bannable” they see these types of accounts as potential bots. but we know reddit just wants less users, and only browsers to site anyways.
Another easy way is to use a VPN like Mullvad. They block you and you can’t see anything.
I DO use Mullvad! It’s only $5 a month. I love it.
I feel like I went through withdrawals, took like a month to get over it, now I rarely use reddit, not missing anything, just thought I was, I guess I do miss reddit from like 2015, but it was getting worse every year, one of my last posts months before my permaban was asking for alternatives. (It’s how I found lemmmy lol)
Reddit is also at a point where everything has been asked and is asked again weekly, i don’t really need to post/comment anything myself and my votes mean nothing because of the volume. Most of my comments would get lost in a void.
i think everyone, before the ban was pretty addicted to reddit especally logging in. i only skim through reddit now and then. i visit pet related, and science related subs more often(since im banned i just browse without logging in)
Can corroborate lmao. They’ve saved me so much time that I usually spent correcting misinfo, but I guess that’s what they want on their platform. Anyways Lemmy’s been an okay replacement.
They use weirdly aggressive fingerprinting to make sure you don’t make any new accounts, too. What a bunch of weirdos.
It’s so easy
There’s still way too many niche communities on Reddit that just haven’t taken off on Lemmy e.g. alternative a. Non-team sports.
There’s a ViolentMonkey script that can automatically delete all of your Reddit comments. I just run that every few days.
It’s not ideal, but it’s the best that I can do if I value access to those communities, which I do.
I’m starting to get convinced that Redditors and mods are just gluttons for punishment by that platform.
They’re planning on kneecapping old.reddit in this update too, and you see all the typical howling about “if they kill old.reddit I’m leaving fr this time” while at the same time, another big thread one comment lower is about all the ridiculous bans that people have gotten. And this is a mere two years after the API fiasco.
Why do people continue to use a platform that has proven time and time again that the asshole(s) in charge do not give a single fuck about them?
It’s not about the platform but it’s where most of the people are. There’s just not a lot of people here, especially in relation to niche subjects.
There could be if people had / acted in accordance with any kind of principles of self respect. They’re ants in some rich mega douche’s ant farm, donating their time and energy to their captor, but refuse to make the fucking 6-inch journey to a free ant hill beside them.
Almost all of us are here because of the API bullshit. Those who stayed did us a favour, I reckon.
Thats what i like about it. They can stay there.
Fuck it’s been two years…
Reddit is in an incestuous relationship with Google. So it’ll remain relevant as long as it’s results keep getting into the front page of the biggest search engine. Add to that, the results getting fed into AI responses.
Influencers and marketers love Reddit at least as much as they still love Twitter.
How are they kneecapping old.reddit?
I got my 15 year old account permanently banned for filing one report against a user who was stalking my profile to call me slurs. (This was “abusing the report button”, apparently.) Everyone in my household got their accounts banned alongside mine. It’s very strange how the site is being run now.
Yeah. When my 12 year old account got banned I stopped caring about that site and started creating new accounts every week and just posting whatever the hell I wanted without feeling like I needed to censor myself anymore. So their ban happy culture tends to have the opposite effect of what they want.
There’s a browser script out there that auto-adds all your subs back from your old account, so it really wasn’t even inconvenient for me other than the 2 minutes it takes to create a throwaway email account and create a new throwaway Reddit account.
And yeah, their methods for preventing you from coming back end up preventing others using the same computer or in the same household from coming back, so they just lose users. Their methods aren’t very sophisticated though, so it’s pretty easy to avoid them.
Shit site.
The problem with that is that it’s so locked down now you need an account of X age with Y karma, so the majority of the site isn’t something you can participate in. And I get it, lots of spam accounts and whatnot, but still shitty that they’re a hair trigger away from destroying years worth of built up karma over nothing.
“Let’s get rid of our longest running users, that should help the site move forward.”
In a fucked up way, yes. As in I think it’s intentional/logical on their part. The culture of reddit has been changing for a while. I think they would want the “old heads” to leave, but also leave behind their posts/comments for others (and Reddit) to benefit off of.
That’s why people use those web apps that overwrite their comments with garbage. But I always think about how Reddit controls the servers, data, and backups.
Yeah my 10+ yr account was like #340 in comment karma or some shit, I was clearly a contributor, but they banned me for nothing. Wish I would have sold it now.
How much karma was that? I lost 3 accounts and one had over 100k comment karma, so they lost another good user here as well.
I loved to post solutions to problems that never got solved on several subreddits, oh well.
So how does a person sell their account !?
Woah… what’s this? I had no idea reddit accounts hold value!
Yes because they IP ban people
IP banning in this day and age is crazy. Years ago I opened my app on hospital WiFi and instantly both of my accounts in there were banned for “ban evasion”. Clearly someone used that IP address to get banned and now everyone using the public WiFi there is just getting banned.
It also made it clear that a big part of shutting down third party clients was so they could track us better. Made evident the minute my personal and work reddit accounts were banned together even though I never switched to the other login at all. With that move they could tie everyone’s throwaways back to their real accounts.
Reddit has a whole metagame on trolling users in these ways. I don’t think corporate cares at all. If anything spez probably welomes it.
Obligatory fuck Spez.
I got a lifetime ban after 12 years on Reddit. I still have no clue why, and I really, really don’t care.
Imagine still using Reddit in 2025.
I got banned for updooting Luigi stuff.
And I’ll fucking do it again!
I got banned for criticizing billionaires.
It’s interesting to see the site treat it’s unpaid workers more and more like low level employees. I guess capitalists just can’t help themselves.
I’m surprised that Reddit has any active users, personally. It’s just so… Fake now.
Reddit has been dead since February, when Spez met with The Goblin, and then permabanned thousands, maybe millions of highly active accounts, including me. I was permabanned for repeating a post I had made many times with no issues. After 12 years, and almost a million Karma, I was suddenly too dangerous to allow on the platform, along with thousands of others.
We high volume posters built Reddit, but we shifted from being assets to problems after Trump was elected again.
Breaking news: Reddit is on fire again. In other news, rain contains water and Twitter is full of Nazis. More at ten.
Funny to hear from the new mods that replaced their predecessors during the protest. Now it’s their turn to be replaced
These mods have ignored the previous waves of people leaving reddit. They were aware of this and have been warned but chose to stay
'member when redditors would ALL leave because of the API restrictions? This will have no real effect whatsoever. I’m glad that most redditors didn’t move to lemmy.
Reddit users, as have Xitter, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, etc., have all demonstrated that you can do whatever the fuck you want to them and they’ll just keep coming back for more, no matter what.
I joined after getting some weird warning about upvoting comments reddit didn’t like. That left a sour taste in my mouth.
Lol fuck reddit cuck mods anyways.
Literally another attempt to appear legit by putting in place an easily circumventable rule.
So first they don’t even check if mods are using alt accounts to moderate other subs but even if they do force it, it’s so easy to click a button on your VPN and you are free to be anyone you want according to “Reddit Corps Super Advanced Security System.”
There’s a saying in my language that fits this situation perfectly: “Tja.”
Got banned from the stims community after satirically commenting ‘I’m 14 and what is this?’
The moderator demanded that I submit identity documents. I pointed out that the account was twelve years old but they couldn’t back down at this point. I think they were trying to do a good job and were at least active but it was another nail in the coffin. In theory, an unpaid mod could be more objective because there’s no profit motive but the reality is that many are ideologically biased or dumb or controlling and none of them are trained. That any single individual wants to be in charge of the narrative is suspicious. Scale that ambition up to hundreds of thousands or millions of people it’s a red flag. Reddit is completely cooked these days, I haven’t returned since finding Lemmy.
Fuck Reddit. It needs to die, along with discord.
Fuck Reddit basement dwelling mods and fuck Reddit in general, so glad I’m done with that shit app, I say something a little mean and I get perm banned, fucking losers
How is no one mentioning the abuse on r/conservative where spewing all kinds of falsehoods, and xenophobias and you are gold, but trying to provide factual information gets banned?
I think there are more things to worry about than the number of groups someone helps moderate.
And alsothere is no recourse against improper bans. I was banned from my corresponding country sub because a moderator misinterpreted something I said.
lol of course power mods would say that.
Fuck that dumbass site.
I have negative respect for mods at this point.
I’ve seen too much unchecked mod abuse to ever take their decisions seriously again.
ekZepp@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Image
renegadespork@lemmy.jelliefrontier.net 2 weeks ago
Me literally every time my friends start bitching about Instagram.
undefined@lemmy.hogru.ch 2 weeks ago
I’m always like “who the fuck uses Instagram?” I guess I’m living in a different world entirely.
Cris_Color@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Just remember, people will be more open to trying the stuff you’re into if you’re compassionate about the things they’re frustrated with!
(This is intended for anyone who wants friends or acquaintances to try the fediverse platforms. For those who don’t or don’t care that’s perfectly valid too :)
RiQuY@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
What’s the second logo?
scintilla@crust.piefed.social 2 weeks ago
First picture I found on Google for each because I’m lazy but there they are with pictures attached.
Piefed
Piefed
Lemmy
Lemmy
Mastodon
Mastodon
Pixelfed
Pixelfed
Nephalis@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
The outer right one? This is lemmy. A link aggregator like reddit
9point6@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Piefed?