“Reddit cannot survive without its moderators. It cannot.” - The Verge

All they had to do was allow Reddit premium users to access the site using third-party apps.

I'm with you. I get needing to make money, but needing to go public and become just another cringe social media platform is just sad. RIP Reddit. Hello Lemmy.

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I think the growth of Lemmy over the last few weeks is a clear indicator that Reddit is in decline. I have deleted Apollo and my reddit bookmark and have only gone back when a Google search provided the information I needed. I won't be going back and I think a lot of people are of the same mind.

I think only linux users moved over here... maybe

I don't think he knows what he's doing.. in his mind he's running the last meter of the finish line to the IPO when all these "problems" are cropping up for "no reason" and he just wants to finish the race

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Sadly, I don't think so. I think they looked at the number of new users and the number of users using 3rd party apps and decided they can lose those.

Edit: apparently Reddit has between 500 million and 1.6 billion active users monthly. According to RiF developers, RiF and Apollo have a combined 3 million active users. If all of those 3rd party app users decide to never go back, Reddit might lose between 0.6% and 0.2% of their userbase. I think they'll be fine...

As much as I would like to do this I have too many posts there have legitimately helped people who were struggling with things.

I've had people respond to months old posts thanking me on several occasions for helping them. I can't in good conscience remove thay just to spite reddit, and I do a lot of stuff out of spite.

I wasn't on digg back in the day. What happened to it?

They're just looking for that sweet IPO cash grab.

Unfortunately for Spez and the rest of Reddit, they're too late to actually cash in on their 18 year-old startup.

reddit was the same thing as twitter, just a woke censorship mob that deleted dissenting opinions or even insinuating a slightly different viewpoint.

This is a common argument that I usually see people making, there are a few big problems though with the idea of just getting new moderators. The first problem is that moderation is difficult. It's really easy to look at online posts talking shit about moderators and think that you could do a better job than them but you couldn't and neither could most people, it is a very tedious and difficult process, while there may be many people who are willing to do it there are not as many people who are cut out to do it.

The second problem is that the API changes that Reddit has imposed will make content moderation ever more difficult due to the loss of automated tools that help. People are going to bring up reddit's promise to bring moderating tools to the mobile app or to improve moderation tools in general, this is most certainly an empty promise and even if fulfilled they will do the absolute bare minimum. This is a problem because it means that even for seasoned moderators content moderation is going to become increasingly difficult. Now imagine for somebody who isn't a seasoned veteran moderator, who was freshly appointed by Reddit's administration to fill the roles of mods who quit. I imagine they're probably not going to be able to do this job effectively.

Even If you hired a paid moderator team they would still be nowhere near as effective as the volunteers who poured their heart and soul into it, especially considering that those moderators will be working regular jobs. They're not going to be able to moderate to the lengths that an unpaid volunteer could. This is also ignoring the fact that Reddit very much cannot afford to appoint paid administrators to moderate all of the largest subs on Reddit, considering that making a lot of money is their goal that just isn't sustainable.

So yeah while they could get new moderators it would not be a very easy task for them, and would definitely come with severe drawbacks. Obviously Steve Huffman doesn't really care, he'll probably try it anyway and who knows maybe it'll seem to work out short term, the new moderators won't really be put to the test until they have to deal with a large scale bot attack, either coordinated or uncoordinated. A good thing to keep in mind is that the scammers are watching this scenario, they've already started using it to their advantage by messaging moderators pretending to be administrators as a phishing attack. An experienced mod might be able to Ward this off or not be affected, but in unexperienced mod may fall for this kind of attack without knowing better.

Its not just replacing mods though. Take the issue that happened with that snack sharing subreddit. The current mods held it for 10+ years. They built several tools that automated verification and rating people who shared with each other and it prevents a LOT of drama and scams. Then reddit replaced them because of the protest. But what about the automated tools that they personally made for "their" sub. The owner of those tools took them down. The new mod put them back up. They will die on the 30th anyways because they wont make the API requirements and if they are forced to stay up byt he new mods then the person who will have to pay reddit for the API usage is no longer the mod there.

This is not a unique situation either. Tons of people made auto moderation bots and tool over the past 16+ years. Most of those tools break today and if the mods are replaced then those tools are stolen from the owners. If the owners remove the tools reddit sees that as protesting and removes the mods.

It's going to be a train wreck and a legal nightmare.

Even in a perfect world you are replacing mods that know the communities and have created them and worked on them for years with a new set of mods with no attachment or experience running those communities.

Reddit will REALLY be good when those apathetic users are all that's left to produce content and moderate subs! /s

It's easy to index decentralized networks is literally Google. Every website is decentralized from every other website the fact that Lemmy/kbin/Masterson sites can communicate with each of the doesn't really make any difference.

You can use Lemmy Explorer to search through all 900 or so Instances for the communities you're interested in.

This is true. I suspect for many mods the power they have to push their ideas, ideals and beliefs and punish who they see fit more than makes up or the fact that they do it for free.

The only thing that makes me sad is we cannot take the years of knowledge stored in reddit with us. Some of those co tributors who posted valuable contributions are not active anymor or some has quietly passed away irl.

If reddit decides to wall their site, unviewable to non paid subscribers, then it will be like an end of a small scale civilization where poeple go back to basic living,

I hope in time we can rebuild the same kind of knowledge here.

One of the comments on the Verge article, that I agree with:

There's nothing wrong with the mods being volunteers. Reddit just needs to respect them (and the other users) more. In fact if the mods were paid employees there'd just be even less standing in the way of these administration deuchebag moves. And I think that if they were paid hires there'd be less assurance that the mods were truly interested in the subject matter of their subs - I'm just hypothesizing there. Anyway I don't think the volunteer model wasn't working. It's the admin layer outside the mods that's broken.

Facebook rebranded to Meta and burned $13 billion on the "metaverse" to stay relevant. So, Facebook doesn't seem to think that Facebook will be around forever. Reddit does have critical mass, which is an advantage for them. There's no denying that. But, it's their advantage to waste by being overly aggressive and greedy, which they seem to be happy to do.

As for Google searches, it might be less that Reddit is so valuable for search and more that Google has become so bad at providing good search results that Reddit became the go between. There's a lot of very specific knowledge on Reddit, but there's also a lot of redirects from Reddit comments to outside sources that have the info that a Google search should be able to provide. I don't know if Google has the will to fix that problem though. If Reddit can "get back to normal" and continue being Google's sidekick, Google might be happy to return to the status quo. But, once a company like Reddit adopts the policy that "the beatings will continue until morale improves," it's hard to imagine how they can get back to "normal."

I'm okay with lemmy getting just enough traction to bring in the best users without being "popular"