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.
This is actually another of Reddit’s decisions that I’m in agreement with. Subscriber count isn’t a very useful number, it largely just measures how old a subreddit is. You can already see how old the subreddit is much more accurately by looking at its founding date.
Active users are literally all that matter. When a user is banned permanently from Reddit, they aren’t unsubscribed from any subs. They’re still included in the total subscriber number.
Showing total subscriber numbers is hiding the details. Showing active user counts is the opposite.
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.
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.
At the risk of agreeing with Reddit:
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.
*ulterior
*exterior
*widdershins
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.
Now /u/spez will have all the power
Gotta boost user numbers.
Or obscure them considering not letting people see sub count only daily/weekly activities
Total subscriber number is useless, daily/weekly/monthly active users is infinitely more important and useful.
This is actually another of Reddit’s decisions that I’m in agreement with. Subscriber count isn’t a very useful number, it largely just measures how old a subreddit is. You can already see how old the subreddit is much more accurately by looking at its founding date.
If they’d added, yes. But removing it completely is just a way to hide how many are on the platform.
Or left in a protest
You’ve got that backwards.
Active users are literally all that matter. When a user is banned permanently from Reddit, they aren’t unsubscribed from any subs. They’re still included in the total subscriber number.
Showing total subscriber numbers is hiding the details. Showing active user counts is the opposite.
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.
at least you wernt like that anti-work mod that went ON FOX, that actually drew negative attention to the site.