I don't think many moderators will actually quit as long as the users are there, especially since reddit gave back some moderator API call access. Moderating is already a terrible, thankless job. The people who do it enjoy moderating because (I assume) they're 'in charge' of something big and important. I don't think reddit closing off third party access will be enough to convince most of these people to stop giving labor for free.
This is the thing I don't get, reddit is getting a heck of a free ride with all these mods. You'd think they would do everything within their power to enable them so why kick them in the nuts?
Also the "power" users would probably be happy to pay reasonable prices to interact with it via app/api, so go ahead and charge something REASONABLE.
There's something nefarious going on behind the scenes and it's all very suspicious. I'm happy to go back to targeted forums if I need to.
Indeed. I'd happily pay Reddit directly for an API key if that let me run RIF in a "bring your own key" mode. They could split the profits between themselves and app dev. I'm surprised no one is proposing this. But I guess this comes down to people willing and able to pay to avoid adtech cancer being actually the most profitable cohort for the advertisers...
this is explicitly blocked by TOS. You can notionally do it by taking a "RedditIsFun" APK and injecting your own API key and then sideloading, but they'll do app store takedowns for any third-party app that supports it natively (because it's a TOS violation).
I don't even think it's behind the scenes. It seems plain as day that they're trying to recoup the cost of their shitty website redesign and even shittier app. Since everybody is using third-party apps (which use the API), they pulled the most tonedeaf, corporatist approach and targeted those third-party apps. Instead, they should have dome some soul-searching to realize that they burned a money pile to make garbage because they decided their primary users were advertisers.
Where you assume malice, I would assume a combination of garden variety greed and short sightedness. Sometimes people do dumb things, it's pretty common really, even for 'people in charge of big things'.
> You'd think they would do everything within their power to enable them so why kick them in the nuts?
They're probably tracking revenue and engagement metrics. This happens in a lot of places. Everyone knows there's important infrastructure that keeps things working, but new user-facing projects are always more exciting. Even with physical infrastructure, it's more exciting to build new roads than fix potholes.
What you're saying here sounds to me like "I think the current moderators are bad, get rid of them all and get new ones who will be much better"
I have some ...doubts about how well something like this would work in practice. Burning large systems down and starting over is generally not more efficient than tweaking the system you have.
They’re not. The political leaders at the top are, but the civil servants who actually keep the lights on and everything running stick around from administration to administration.
We’ve learnt a lot about the necessity for institutional knowledge and continuation over the years.
Reddit with a whole new set of mods will be a worse experience overall. The largest and most general subs will probably be alright but good luck finding mods for the more focused and specialist subs.
That's such an uncharitable view of Reddit moderation. Look at examples like /r/cfb and /r/collegebasketball for good hard-to-replace moderation. Game threads (and post-game discussions) are consistently formatted and on-topic. And the mods are able to invite coaches for AMAs with no drama.
The people complaining about moderators are the very same people who don’t read the rules and complain that the moderators are on a power trip.
I moderate a small sub 15K and the amount of spam is insane. I can’t imagine the amount of work involved in a 1M sub.
I'm a lead mod of a 1.5M+ sub and we maybe remove 1-2 bits of spam per week. Usually the very few that do get through our filters are quickly reported by the users and are removed long before it gains traction
I realize giving reddit mod advice on HN is a bit weird, but here is what we've done that has significantly helped
1. Operate off a white list for links instead of a blacklist -- allow posts from domains like twitter, github or whatever is a normal for your community. Set up auto mod to filter any domains outside of the whitelist so mods can review and approve the appropriate ones
2. No URL shorteners at all. There are very good anti-url-shortener scripts for automod. Adding this cut out 90% of the spam we got
Those are two suggestions that i would give to any subreddit. Here are some that you should carefully weigh before you implement
1. Set up automod to filter a post / comment if it gets to a certain threshold of reports.
2. Enforce a minimum karma amount & age to post w/ automod
3. Enforce a minimum karma amount to comment with a link w/ automod
To give you a starting point -- even our large subreddit, our requirement to post is an account older than 6 hours and >0 Karma. For comments with a link, we do >25 karma
