Boz (he/him)

Yeah, I think a lot of people who would be interested in moderating have taken a good look at how Reddit is treating existing mods, and gone, “nahhh.”

…I honestly thought that was a deliberate pun, because Reddit as link aggregator was not optimal, either…

I’m happy to see people thinking about this, but I think that the existence of Meta’s Threads makes any use of the word “thread” an unnecessary association with Meta, if not an outright advertisement. Deeper meaning has, historically, never been as important for controlling how a term is used as sheer numbers. Way more people are using “Threads” to refer to the Meta product than are talking about the fediverse at all, and none of them are going to care why we should have dibs on “thread” as part of our name. They’ll just go, “threadiverse? Is that like Threads? Threads is just ads, I don’t know why you’d want to use it.”

As an alternative, I like “forumverse,” because Lemmy and kbin remind me of old-school forums, and it still links up with “fediverse” because of the “verse,” and because the word has the same rhythm. But I usually just tell my friends I’m on Lemmy, since I browse through a Lemmy instance, and that greatly influences my experience. I don’t mind adding that Lemmy is just one platform for accessing the same content, because it launches me into an explanation of how this is not a corporation-owned discussion space.

Paid in IOUs, maybe. I think Reddit is too cheap to pay for people to mod large subs when it can just let the large subs turn into large shitholes for free.

This. The whole question of whether Reddit meant to restore comments is a distraction. The actual issue is that people who wanted their comments deleted are finding that their comments have not been deleted. If Reddit wants to prove that it was not their fault, they can do it in court. No lawyer is going to believe the kind of half-assed excuses Reddit has been handing out. I would like to see this hashed out in court, if for no other reason than that a court case is probably the best way to find out what is actually happening here. It seems like Reddit not going to be honest unless they’re forced to be, even when honesty would benefit them.

Please do so, when you can. This is not just about protesting, deletion can be a matter of personal safety for some people, which is why these laws exist.

I wouldn’t be surprised. This is the kind of problem that would usually only affect a small number of users. They should probably have done something about it before it had a chance to come back and bite them…

Whether they’re doing it on purpose is not relevant to the legal aspect of the situation. They have a responsibility to honor deletion requests. If a user complains, the appropriate response is “sorry you had a problem, we’ll fix it,” not “sorry, we will only honor our legal responsibilities if you follow our preferred [but not stated until now] procedure for requesting deletion, try again.” Having database problems opens you up to legal liability whether you like it or not, and trying to convince users that you are not responsible for your own database is… inappropriate.

Besides, there have been bugs with manual deletion, too. This is at least partly a problem with their own systems.

“Welcome to gaslighting 101! Please take a syllabus from the pile you will [not] find by the door, which will [not] include your instructor’s contact information and office hours.”

I don’t know, I think Musk might actually have an inferiority complex. He’s obsessed with himself, but he puts an awful lot of effort into trying to prove that he’s cool. But yeah, they’re both terrible, it doesn’t really matter who’s worse.

Probably the shirtless pic was a carefully calculated move to short-circuit theories about his lack of humanity, by showing that he has a navel. [/s]

…for real, though, at least the man utilizes his paid PR staff.

Yes, the quality can be garbage, but I think a lot of the automatic scrollers require both quantity and low repost rate so they don’t run into stale content while they’re having their daily scroll. I think quality will go first, then the repost level will rise (and I know, it’s already high, lol, but it’ll get worse), and eventually either the quantity overall will go, or all the content will be created by bots, which will eventually drive off even the casual users. And when enough users go, the advertisers will go, and that is what will actually put Reddit on the rocks. It might take several years to happen, based on the changes they have already made, but they have the power to accelerate it if they fail hard enough.

What really creates train wreck appeal for me is how hard they are deliberately failing. I agree with the general sentiment that it’s profit-motivated, and they have to do something to get profits, but they are missing a lot of sane, likely-to-work options in favor of pipe dreams and emotional abuse.

I think Huffman may have gotten rid of the “other people’s opinions matter” part of his worldview, due to decades of everyone in his life telling him that he sucks, and needs to get his shit together.

I knew there was something else I should be adding to my box of cake mix! Turns out it was “fuckspez”!

I liked the Mashables title: “Reddit is trying to make nice with its moderators. They aren’t having it.”

Yes, I think content warnings make it easier to have difficult conversations, not harder. People who don’t want to discuss something are not magically going to become open to those discussions because you spring the topic on them without warning. Content warnings save time, and give people a chance to brace themselves before going into what is usually a big fight.

I like that this is being covered in The Independent, which, afaik, is not a tech-specific publication. Sure, they’re being prim about the phrasing of the protest message, but they’re presenting the motivation behind it in a relatively sympathetic way.

I think they actually did put in fine print saying they could remove about a dozen different kinds of things, including insulting specific people. So this is an example of general restrictions on content creation in /place rather than specific anti-protest action. But it’s still an example of Reddit sucking. If they don’t want free expression, they shouldn’t market this as an opportunity for free expression.

That’s definitely a case where absolute numbers matter, yeah. I miss the shared-experience subs most, too, though there’s a surprising amount of stuff here already. You might try posting about narcolepsy in some of the broader health [or whatever category you’d put it in] communities, and see who’s there. That’s the kind of thing people might not expect to find at all at this point.

But I think a lot of people are talking about hobby communities, which can be made active by either a large number of people who post rarely, or a smaller number who post frequently, without having to change the overall content very much (I think a lot of people who share any projects could share more projects than they do). The number of people required for “critical mass “ in a forum is a lot lower than people think, and also, a lot more affected by who the people are, and the climate of the community. It’s something I (and I’m sure many others) remember from before massive platforms existed, but apparently it is not obvious to people who didn’t see it. Different experiences, different internet, but I think the essential desire for community is the same, and small communities can flourish in the same way.

Yep! I think it’s also a great example of how well a simple message can propagate. The whole emotional force of about six weeks of emotional drama has boiled down into eight letters, repeated by… what would you say, thousands?… of individuals.