> Nestler also suggested that this is an issue of personal responsibility, writing that “communities should honor the expectations they set – public communities should remain accessible to all; private communities should remain private.”
By that logic--functioning as a champion of casual visitors--shouldn't Reddit start being responsive when a moderation team gets taken over by a new clique and starts banning most of the regulars?
As a personal side-gripe: Their anti-spam/appeals process is also broken: A frequent account in good standing for over a decade can get l shadowbanned (including all comments anybody else ever made in reply), have the appeal granted, and then nothing is fixed and there's no way to contact anybody because the appeals page falsely claims the account is normal.
Both Reddit and Nextdoor are suffering greatly from their volunteer mod problem.
They have basically allowed the worst elements of their community to dominate and manipulate their most valuable properties (the subs belong to Reddit, and when a bad mod team ruins a sub that hurts Reddit more than anyone)
Reddit corporate has also ruined small communities and directly allowed this kind of power mod takeover via minimum activity rules.
What’s a minimum activity rule?
I'm curious how shadow-banning is even allowed by their own ToS.
If Reddit breaks the ToS, does that mean the "irrevocable" publishing license for everything you contributed is actually revoked?
As a matter of contract law, it seems odd to be able to declare something will survive the breaking of the contract's terms. (As distinct from regular termination.)
Ex: "The seller will irrevocably transfer ownership of the car to the buyer, and the buyer will give the seller X dollars", and then the buyer's check bounces.
The remedy has to be commensurate with the damage. In your car analogy, the remedy is pretty clearly "Give the car back" or similar.
In the Reddit ToS case, it's not clear that revoking licenses already granted will make you whole again. It all depends on the specific nature of the infraction and if penalties for it are already laid out in the contract. If Reddit declines your request to take a sub private, then why would taking away license to your comment fix anything? It's purely punitive, and I doubt there are any statutes with punitive damages that apply to this scenario.
In any case, I'd imagine that the ToS makes you agree to arbitration if you take issue with Reddit's adherence to it. Arbitration clauses aren't inserted into contracts because of how famously impartial and sympathetic arbiters are to plaintiffs. They're in there because they're a stacked deck.
Dupe: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41698762>
Also covered at the Verge (via an earlier, low-traction, HN submission):
[dupe]
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41698762
So what’s the next Reddit? Like, there are tons of projects working on twitter replacements, but is there anything with any kind of steam for a federated discussion forum?
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
Lemmy is one such alternative. I follow a few instances.
I moved to Lemmy back in 2020, and last logged in to Reddit in 2023. Here are some thoughts for those interested:
* Lemmy has much more "extreme" roots. The original people who went to Lemmy back in 2018/2019 have very strong political ideologies, and even though Lemmy is much bigger now, those roots really shaped the culture of Lemmy
* Lemmy is federated, sort of like email. You can self-host your own email provider if you really want, but you should probably just register to one of the top 3 providers
* Lemmy is missing niche communities. At around ~1% the size of Reddit, you just won't find a community for your favorite game, city, or meme genre
* Lemmy is obviously open source (AGPL), and their servers are very cheap to run (compared to Reddit's insane op costs)
* As a poster, I enjoy "contributing" quality content to Lemmy. No one is getting rich or IPOing off my work, and it is clearly designed in a way that even if the founders wanted to make it profitable, they couldn't
Tl;dr For KPIs, Lemmy is objectively worse than Reddit. The only real reason to go is if you like the "alternative" social media services.
The problem so far is that everyone creates alternative projects, but nobody actually builds communities.
Instead of going private, could mods just setup auto-moderator to automatically delete everything?
Sure they can.
Also, isn't there a function to only allow approved submitters to post in a subreddit?
The problem with censorship it makes you feel so good for being so rigtous for doing it. But it's like eating at McDonald's, do it once and it might feel filling. Do it all the time and you'll smell like their French fries, and people will start avoiding you. Someone posted some stats on 4chan and in one of their top reddits only a handful of people were online. So at this point Reddit might be bots talking to bots being censored by bots.
I don’t see what the point of Reddit is anymore. Ever since 2016, the site has undergone a series of massive changes - purges of various subreddits, consolidation of moderator control, aggressive moderation/censorship polices, and a user hostile design. It’s an echo chamber and propaganda machine, precisely because no different opinions are allowed to exist or gain popularity due to the dictatorial control of site admins and mods. Everyone hates on X/Twitter but it allows a far more honest discussion than Reddit.
I got permanently banned from Reddit for saying Hamas must be destroyed. The site is absolute garbage and I can’t wait until whatever’s next takes over.
Ideally just abolish all mOdErAtOrS altogether. But this is a good first step
What alternative would you suggest?