• forgotmylastusername@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Mods weren’t ever supposed to anybody but janitors. That isn’t in a derogatory tone. The anonymous userbase was the original value proposition of reddit. The expertise came from random nobodies. Usernames didn’t matter on reddit because nobody looked at it. It seems this is long forgotten history from a time when the internet was primarily IT nerds.

    By the time mods were becoming somebodies, reddit was past its prime. Once the power structures started forming it was over. As we’re seeing now reddit is hinges on single point of failure. The expertise among the userbase has gradually left the platform long before this API stuff. A long slow process years in the making.

    Internet janitors are a dirty but necessary job not unlike the real world. Somebody has to scrub toilets and pick produce. People are a-holes on the internet who need to be put in their place. Reddit has long since become too hoity-toity for that. Now mods are supposed to be experts in their field. Too high to be digital toilet scrubbers. Too scared of “muh free speech” to janitor the Greater Fuckwads anymore. So reddit is an asylum run by the inmates. Expertise can’t be assed to contribute to a dumpster.

    On another note. The imgur purge has also contributed to the barren wasteland of reddit content history. So many dead posts.

    • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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      1 year ago

      It is more that Reddit wanted its moderators to not be anyone important, especially under the current CEO. Ditching the default subs, firing Victoria, heavily maiming r/all, and other actions were geared to prevent mods from gaining power over Reddit. On the flipside, Reddit maintained the mod ranking based on when a mod joined specifically to keep communities from forming more legitimate methods of mod selection.

      Mods were supposed to be weak while being scapegoats for Reddit in case something went wrong.

    • BigBananaDealer@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      the free speech argument doesnt really make sense as reddit was founded on being “the last bastion of free speech”

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      But you can’t be a ‘janitor’ on a sub like r/canning without understanding canning. You can’t know who is posting unsafe information unless you know what is unsafe. That’s the problem.

      • 5714@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        Isn’t that similar in real life? Taking care of the elderly and sick, firefighting etc. are or have very specialised ‘janitor’-like tasks that need specific knowledge.

      • Natanael@slrpnk.net
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        1 year ago

        I run a cryptography subreddit and we have the same problem. You don’t necessarily need to be an expert in everything, but you absolutely MUST be able to tell who knows what they’re talking about and who doesn’t

    • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      They became the equivalent to automated customer service lines. Nothing but bots with no humans available to address concerns. Any attempt to contact a mod generally resulted in an arrogant reply.