Copy of the post in the event it is deleted or you don’t want to give ****it any traffic.
Hey again, /r/PICS!
We have another interesting development for you: /u/ModCodeofConduct still hasn’t responded to our request for a public reply… but they have seen fit to threaten us:
This is a final warning for inaccurately labeling your community NSFW which is a violation of the Mod Code of Conduct rule 2. Your subreddit has not historically been considered NSFW nor would they under our current policies.
Please immediately correct the NSFW labeling on your subreddit. Failure to do so will result in action being taken on your moderator team by the end of this week. This means moderators involved in this activity will be removed from this mod team. Moderators may also be subject to additional actions, e.g., losing the ability to join mod teams in the future.
Lastly, if you suddenly begin to post, or approve content that features sexually explicit content to your community in order to justify the NSFW label, we will immediately remove and permanently suspend moderators who have participated in this action.
Needless to say, we responded as you would expect:
Please read and publicly respond to our message addressing this.
We are not in violation of the cited rule as it is written. Moreover, according to Reddit’s listed policies, our subreddit is considered NSFW. If these policies are themselves in error, please correct their verbiage immediately. Otherwise, /r/PICS reverting to SFW would itself be in violation of those same policies.
Our team is currently discussing our actions in the meantime. Please permit us some time to reach a consensus.
Maddeningly, /u/ModCodeofConduct is telling us to go against Reddit’s listed guidelines, which puts us in something of a pickle: If we follow their commands, we’ll be in violation of the site-wide rules… but if adhere to said rules, they’ll remove us. /r/InterestingAsFuck is still unmoderated (at the time of this writing), so we can reasonably assume that our removal would effectively kill this community.
Well, we don’t want /r/PICS to die, so while we figure out how best to handle the situation (which includes waiting for a public, user-visible response from /u/ModCodeofConduct), we’re going to be exploring new ways of ensuring that innocent, unsuspecting users are not presented with offensive content. One possible avenue would see you – yes, you, the upstanding Redditor reading this – having the ability to tag any post that you personally found offensive.
If you have any other ideas, please share them in the comments!
Sorry for the confusion, /r/PICS! We’ll get back to you with more soon!
I’m surprised the larger subreddits haven’t called their bluff. People keep talking like thousands are going to line up to moderate subreddits for free.
Where do you source new moderators? Ask the community? Most redditors don’t want to be stuck on hall monitor duty and most of the power users that do enjoy it are the ones protesting. Of the ones you get, you’ll have to slowly check each one to ensure they’re on your side, and not a troll/protester that’s willing to trash the entire subreddit the moment you instate them.
It’s not like their corporate connections will help with this either. They want profitability so they aren’t looking to payroll more people. How you drum up 20, unpaid volunteers to moderate a subreddit all day every day? How do you drum up 1000+ to cover a complete walkout.
You can’t do that overnight. It would take time. Even if they give these to established powermods, the span of control will just be too large to manage. The big subreddits just need to call reddit on their bluff. They need to all resign simultaneously and force reddit into this bad position, where most of the platform goes unmoderated for weeks.
That’s what I’ve been saying. Let the admin remove some mods from a subreddit like r/pics with millions of users. I guarantee anyone the appoint will be very done with modding within a week. It’s rich that reddit is threatening to remove any porn posted to r/pics right now, since that will literally become the norm if moderators get removed.
It’s like they expect mods to just appear out of thin air and act the same way as the current mods do
As soon as a big sub goes unmodded call in the NSFW brigades.
Nsfw images with spez photoshopped? Hmmm maybe today Satan.
A good old porn raid eh? I love it.
A boobies blitzkrieg.
Yeah this has been the most obvious answer. The Reddit mods should walk, en masse. If spez wants to be like musk so bad then let him have it. Completely unregulated subreddits going to absolute shit. Advertisers pulling out. Just stop helping them run their own website and it will run right into the ground. Fuck ‘em, they killed all good will this go around and when called on it they’ve doubled and tripled down. I’ve got zero sympathy.
The Reddit mods should walk, en masse.
Coordinate it, so they all walk at the same time. Nuke the automod rules too. Coordinate it off Reddit.
I want to watch the absolute garbage fire that would ensue if the mod teams responsible for moderating probably tens of thousands of rule violating posts every day just walked away.I doubt it would ever happen because the people who do that job for free usually don’t have much else going on. It’s hard to walk away from the thing that gives you purpose, a sense of belonging to a community and a feeling of power, no matter how sad that might sound.
IIRC from when I was modding, the automod rules have a history function so even if they were deleted, the new mods could see and reinstate the rules quite easily.
If I recall correctly (it’s been 84 years…), the history only shows the last changes. (I think it was 50, but I’m not sure.) So the mods could theoretically erase the automod rules, then submit a bunch of dummy changes, and the automod rules won’t be recoverable.
Ah, that does make sense. Bit of a shame, though.
It gets worse.
One of the reasons why those Reddit powermods are in power is because they’re willing to moderate a subreddit for 8h, 12h, perhaps even 16h a day. They take it as a job; the replacements won’t, at most they’ll be willing to check the sub twice a day and that’s it.
So to replace every single of those powermods you’ll need at least a half dozen new mods. Good luck finding them, Reddit! And if Reddit does find such huge amount of mods, you’ll get huge mod teams that will be fucking hell for the users and the mods themselves.
I looked at that mod code of conduct account and they’re posting a bunch of “who wants to be mod here” in a lot of subreddits.
I don’t even want the pressure of moderating a niche lemmy sub I don’t know who has the energy and time for large subreddit moderation
I was a mod on a larger subreddit (~4 million users) and it was honestly as boring as you’d expect. The most fun was just hanging out with the other mods because they were fun people, but they might as well have been someone I met doing an activity that was actually enjoyable. I lasted about 4 months before quitting, because I found myself spending more time moderating than studying, which didn’t seem like a healthy way to spend my life.
I think thousands would line up to moderate… But they have no idea what that entails and would quickly lose control
People will line up to do it for free, but not to the level Reddit would expect them to. When communities get too many problematic posts Reddit will scold the mods and expect them to do better. It’s foolish that they threaten to remove the mods.
FInding willing scabs wouldn’t be hard, finding willing competent ones would be.
Small niche subs would probably be fine, but any of the big megasubs would be a trashfire. It’s why I wish every sub did what Interestingasfuck did. They showed exactly what the sub would look like unmoderated and stuck to it.
I’m out of the loop - what happened with/r/interestingasfuck?
Mods went basically hands off, the only things they would moderate are things that broke site-wide rules like child pornography. Anything else at all was fair game. It was a pretty good view of what unmoderated reddit would look like.
After the usual threats, mods didn’t budge so were removed by admins I believe. Last I heard the place was still an unmoderated glorious trash fire.
Good.
Lol just open up the sub and make it Approve-Only for posts, and just approve 1 post an hour, effectively making it a blackout. If admins complain, just say there are no effective moderation tools since API access is paywalled.
“Hey Reddit, we heard you loud and clear that sending your servers too many requests costs you money and makes you unprofitable. No problem, we’ll ease the burden by allowing only one post an hour.”
I remember a sub did that, I think they had a 12 hour approval window. I forget which one, but I think reddit already came down on them.
Meanwhile subs like ComedyHeaven literally approve like one post a month for a whole year 💀
Goddamn, the richness of the shitstorm is like fudge melting in my mouth
sounds like you’re eating shit though.
Did they stutter
Thanks for protecting that dudes right to eat shit. You’re exactly what the founding fathers envisioned for America in 2023. Eat shit and die free, friend.
Popcorn time
R/DnDMemes got the same message and is planning to request an intimidation check tomorrow morning. 🍿
They got nuked like interestingasfuck… No mods now
Let it die, who cares about keeping reddit alive
They’re trying to drive hold outs of the site. I suspect it’s working for some.
Meh. Just let it die. Reddit was wonderful but now it’s a shitshow. No sense keeping a rose alive if it’s headed for woodchipper.
If they were just trolling the admins, it would be one thing, but they are so committed to not losing control of /r/pics, that they’re putting serious work into it. Cmon…
Ehh, you might as well waste as much of the admins time as possible.
I think that they will get banned, no matter what they do. However, the way that they’re setting this up, they’re showing everyone that Reddit rules are used toilet paper - it’s full of crap. They’re forcing the Reddit admins to give them ammunition to use against the admins themselves, I love it.
They continue shooting themselves in the foot… 🤦
Oh no, threatening my unpaid labor so that you can get rich. What ever will I do?
If the mods don’t leave now, they certainly will when Reddit IPOs and we hear how many tens of millions or hundreds of millions Huffman made off their unpaid work.
What boggles the mind in this whole thing is that moderation is the product. These fools are gambling with the only thing they can’t afford to lose.
Here is Reddit inc’s dirty secret. The value they produces as a company is mod labor they don’t control and couldn’t afford to control if they wanted to.
Attempting to gain revenue from AI bots ingesting the site’s content wasn’t the worst idea. Letting that turn into a fight with the moderators was crazy dumb. Nobody needed to know reddits dirty secret until after an ipo if it had been played right. That would have required a CEO who actually knew the secret though.
What’s stupid is if spez just accepted the protests and let it ride out, it likely would’ve ended and go back to normal. But he picked a fight with the mods.
I like how they don’t mention closing and deleting the sub as an action. It’s all about removing mods. What will they do, install their own mods if the whole team tells them to suck it?
Yes. Reddit will do exactly that. They give exactly zero fucks about community cohesion, mod powers, spam bots, literally nothing matters except keeping the flow of generic doomscrolling content flowing so the ad revenue checks keep showing up.
Not the ad revenue checks. Reddit isn’t profitable even with ad revenue. The new reddit profit model is selling freely-contributed user-generated content to AI companies with a lot of money who want to train thei LLM’s on reddit content.
This is about ChatGPT checks, not ad revenue checks.
How about just making all comments complete non sequiturs. Correct sentences, but completely out of context, just to fuck with the AIs. If the comments aren’t all that valuable to teach AIs with anymore, well…
Edit: Also upvoting those comments.
Take a look at the posting history of that code of conduct account. They’re already asking for new mods in a lot of subreddits
Dang, it’s almost like Reddit just wants the “problem” mods to get banned regardless of what they do.
What a shit show.
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This is nuclear malicious compliance at this point. I think they want it shut down in the messiest possible way, and good for them.
Huffman can go fuck himself, the lying, greedy little pigboy.
NSFW subreddits are a black hole in terms of advertising potential. No mainstream company wants their products on display next to porn.
A big subreddit like /r/pics going NSFW, with its absolutely massive userbase, takes out a large chunk of Reddit’s potential advertising appeal.
Glad to know some mods are at least still trying, instead of basically giving up with those John Oliver rules that everyone just takes as a meme.
I apparently missed some bit of Internet trivia. What’s the deal with John Oliver? I gave him a quick Google and he just seems like a random comedian 😂
Some mods tried to have their cake and eat it too, AKA they reopened their subs but wanted to keep protesting, but nothing too extreme as to not get kicked. So some teams decided to make it so users could continue posting but only about comedian John Oliver.
A lot of users were on board because they saw it as a meme (driving some to create high effort John Oliver themed posts with a lot of engagement, the complete oppossite of the “intention”), and most eventually returned to business as usual, just with some picture of John Oliver somewhere in the post. Just look at r/aww who claim to still be protesting but most of their posts are just the usual cute animals but with a picture of John Oliver next to them.
Ah ok. So it’s just a random meme. For the longest time I thought John Oliver was someone important to reddit and they were making fun of him 😂 I wonder how John Oliver feels about all the random meeting about him. I had never heard of him before this.
He has a show LastWeekTonight where every week he shines a spotlight on how the world, usually America (many, many, many times America), is fucked up. By using him as a mascot they are hoping he will feature Reddit on his next episode. And he definitely will. This is exactly in his wheelhouse. He’s also known to do publicity stunts.
They post the full episodes on their YouTube for free awareness. Go check them out.
