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They weren’t forced to reopen. They were threatened with being replaced. Who gives a shit? One can’t even call this cowardly. Who fears losing an unpaid job? This is just pathetic. So much for solidarity. The r/Videos mod team called this from the beginning. They’re prepared to go down with the ship. Of course this would be the natural outcome of a prolonged strike. This is really separating the performative virtue signalling from those who care.
I’m not and never have been a mod. But can understand the conflict of not wanting to reopen but if you don’t you lose a position that you’ve spent a lot of time and energy. They’re probably passionate about their community. Giving that away and seeing someone else destroy all your hard work? Glad I’m not that invested.
It’s called the sunk cost fallacy. “I can’t possibly quit because I’ve put so much time/money/effort into this.”
Don’t forget the addiction to power. Yes, there are all kinds of moderators.
This is such a common attitude, and it’s nonsense. Non-moderators think moderators are “power hungry” when they ban people. While there are some few exceptions, moderators don’t ban people because they like power. Moderators ban people because they’re disruptive and causing trouble.
What moderating is really like, part 1
What moderating is really like, part 2
99% of the people I’ve banned who were not obvious spammers or bots are one kind of troll or another. Usually they fall into three categories: Concern Trolls (“But I’m only saying this for your own good!”), Factoid Trolls (“I’m here to tell you the TRUTH!”), or Disruptive Trolls (dick picks, offensive memes, slurs and racism, etc.).
Roughly 1% of the people I ban apologize for their mistake, remove their rule-breaking content, and either follow the rules or quietly leave.
I regularly get called a power-hungry mod by the crybabies who get angry when they aren’t allowed to break the very clearly stated rules, and repeat their offenses after getting first, sometimes second warnings. They run to other places and go try to stir up other crybabies to come and cause the same kind of trouble.
Moderating is tireless and endless. Jerks don’t get banned for saying “Dur the mods suck! Free Speech!” Jerks get banned because they think the rules are for other people, or because they think that the rules are wrong so that means they don’t have to follow them.
Thank you for coming to my Moose Talk. (Ted is taking a nap right now.)
Eh, I have had mixed results.
There are also moderators that ban out of some weird form of spite/echo chamber enforcement.
Ive seen some examples of feminist / human rights forums/subreddits that had it explicitly in their rules that hate speech and attacking people based on gender was against the rules. Someone was going on a long hate filled speech about how all men are trash and terrible, and I just reported it to the moderators that it broke the rule and I proceeded to get banned for making the report (not even engaging with the chat, just reporting)
I also got banned from /r/askscience during the late stages of COVID and was accused of being an antivaxer by the moderator… Thing is I am extremely pro-vaccines, lol
The reason I got banned? Someone posted some faulty stats interpretations of information and I posted the correction, giving an example case to demonstrate how there was a hole on their claim. Largely speaking they were, in a damaging way, accrediting assumed success to vaccines that wasnt quite proven yet, and I was just like “Well we’d need to the info for X/Y/Z to make that assumption, its very possible but we are missing key info”
Moderator sent me this lol:
We don’t allow conspiracy anti-vaxx nonsense here. Your understanding of stats in general is incredibly flawed.
So yeah, sometimes you just have moderators that are complete assholes and genuinely seem interested in enforcing some kind of weird echo chamber deal, where rationality is not supported.
That one in particular sticks out to me because you’d think that a place like /r/askscience would be understanding of calling stuff out like confirmation biases… >_>;
Different platform, but exactly the same deal moderating Twitch chats. I think my favorite insult that I’ve received was that I was personally “the downfall of Western civilization.”
The upshot to those disruptions happening in an active chat like that though is that everyone sees how much of a knob that person is being and is perfectly happy to see them gone.
No need to get offended just because I mentioned one of the valid reasons.
Pretty sure most of the more anarchist mods got pushed out sometime after the whole Fox News debacle already and since then the content has become less spicy too. Watering all that down again, what is even left? “Please master spez I would like to slightly criticise a corporation, am I allowed to do this or is it against the guidelines and duties of moderators?” or what.
Well, it is all for the best, free thinking people will migrate and rebuild, the rest I won‘t miss.
99% of what made it to /all from there was pretty much “I hate my manager”
I enjoyed the underlying anarchist texts to the movement like Bullshit Jobs by Graeber, The Abolition of Work by Bob Black etc. but yeah discussion of that was minimal and the more people arrived the less there was and I‘m also sure none of that ever made it to r/all.
Ironically, I have a great manager and wonderful job, I just dislike the system as a whole due to a) people around me suffering b) bad experiences growing up I been exploited with internships as somewhat of a cleaner. Thus I like our cleaners more than the CEO and if I were in charge I‘d pay them better too.
Anyway, the biggest advocates for r/antiwork in my mind aren‘t some mods, it‘s actually people like Musk or spez who can‘t help but treat anyone working class like trash and rabble. They push this mentality of everyone should kiss their feet or they deserve to become homeless. As long as they are around, such a movement will persist. I mean it even exists in supposedly-communist China with tang ping and they try to censor it a lot harder, haha good luck! Either they treat people well and foster a positive and engaging work culture or a counterculture arises naturally.
Sorry, now I went off on a tangent all just from this little comment!
Irony
You gotta appreciate the irony of Reddit demanding free labor from mods of a sub that is about labor abuse.
The longer this goes the more it reads like the onion.
More ironic that the mod team agreed.
Mods are forced to work
Nah it’s just power addiction. They can stop any time.
Antiwork mods should quiet quit. Sit back and let the house burn down.
It’s like, come on AntiWork, you had one job. Or none job. You know what I mean.
Federation isn’t like email at all. I don’t know why people keep saying that. You’ll never get a message saying “we’re not receiving email from this server today” unless something has gone horribly wrong.
Email also doesn’t hang with a green loading circle for hours when you try to log in.
gmail and outlook and yahoo just silently drop my emails so I don’t even get the courtesy of a notification, and it’s almost impossible to get it appealed. The server issues will be fixed with time, reddit used to crash all the time.
Smaller domains are blocked all the time, ask your local email admin… just because you’re not getting messages about it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen
I think others are noting how it can be like this. In my experience:
- My kids’ school accounts can only send emails to and receive emails from their teachers’ email addresses. All other emails, including those from fellow students, are blocked.
- I frequently have issues with whitelisted email addresses at work. They sometimes are blocked and I have to go through the tedious whitelisting process all over again.
As someone who runs multiple email servers, this is exactly how it works.
Some email providers will randomly or purposely block emails I sent to them. I get arbitrary blocks or dropped emails on sent emails.
They were not forced, they were pressured. The mods caved to the threat of being replaced, showing everyone that having that little bit of power was always their main priority. I didn’t expect more from dog-walkers.
Right, but what’s their alternative? While they’re still mods they can still affect some level of change. If they completely cede to Reddit’s admin, they have nothing.
While they’re still mods they can still affect some level of change.
If they can’t endure even a 1 week strike on a social network then they cannot affect any change anyway because they are a completely powerless farce. Imagine how quickly they’d fold if this were a RL thing with actual consequences beyond their moderator position.
I mean have we forgotten when last year the mod of that sub went to a live interview and the whole subreddit was so ashamed they had to distance themselves from it? I think the day later they said nobody will interview anymore and they removed the person as a mod and wiped any trace of it? They are a joke, this is just another event that proves it.
Yes everyone against labor abuse is a dog walker basement dweller.
No, just the ones on antiwork
The general themes on r/antiwork helped me leave a job after being disrespected after asking for a fair raise. That led to switching careers into data science and doubling me salary and doing far more meaningful work. There, I met a colleague, a 45 year old woman, and we were talking about pay equity and our current workplace, and she brought up to ME that she followed antiwork during COVID and how it also helped her realize her self-worth. She’s now moved and found an even better opportunity.
It’s mega cringe a lot of the time, and the value drops off after a month or two of following I’d say, but overall I think it was a force for good. At least in two people’s lives.
The utter irony of r/AntiWork being forced to reopen is astounding. Strike broken. Union busted. It’s over.
I wonder why they’re forcing open not particularly advertiser friendly subs like piracy and antiwork?
I wonder if it’s because they know the first few subs to be forced open will make headlines, but the second batch most likely won’t. So by starting with fringe subs it paints the picture that’s it’s not the bigger or more important subs that are participating in the blackout.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see the /r/antiwork mod’s disastrous appearance on Fox News become a talking point again paired with this, so that when people hear “Reddit forces mods to…” that’s the sort of person the public pictures.
I like what /r/pics did.
We – the so-called “landed gentry” – appreciate that Reddit is made great by its users. Uncompensated contributors populate the platform’s many communities with their content, just as volunteer moderators keep spam and bigotry at bay. Since neither we nor Reddit would be here without you, it was only fair to let you determine what /r/Pics should include… and you overwhelmingly chose to feature only images of John Oliver looking sexy. (Seriously, the final vote was -2,329 to 37,331.)
As such, /r/Pics will henceforth feature only images of John Oliver looking sexy.
It’s great, have a scroll. No intent to derail, here’s the thread on !reddit@lemmy.ml: https://lemmy.world/post/206467
I wonder if a similar stunt would have been possible for /r/antiwork. Any ideas? How about: “You must rest on weekdays. Posts and comments are only allowed on weekends.”
I hate to be a party pooper, but I really can’t see how the subreddits doing things like that are in any way a protest.
I highly doubt Reddit cares what anyone is posting pictures of as long as they are legal, and the engagement is high. The only way to post them is to engage with Reddit, whether on their website, through the official app, or through a third party app that has to pay Reddit money to use the API. That’s exactly what Reddit wants.
And as for the mods: in a real life scenario, I can see how the threat of being replaced is scary because it means losing your income… but here? They were doing free labour, and as soon as Reddit threatened to take away their power over a corner of the internet, they immediately gave in and proceeded to encourage their audience to “protest” by engaging with Reddit.
I think it would have been several times more effective if the mods just all quit, and everyone who is “protesting” by engaging with Reddit in one form or another (posting, commenting, or just looking and upvoting) just left. I really doubt Reddit is even worried about what is happening now.
people go to reddit for the content. if the content isn’t on reddit anymore, they will end up elsewhere. filling reddit up with content that nobody really cares about will dissuade people from using reddit.
I think the point is this dissuades lurkers, as it’s boring.
The lurkers are the ones upvoting. I’m certain that not posting content would be much more boring. What would lurkers do with a drought of content?
To be completely honest, all of these just sound like a lot of excuses for people to toss their alleged ideals and values aside and keep using Reddit, while soothing their conscience by pretending they are still doing something.
And I say “alleged ideals” because if one drops them as soon as they encounter any resistance and it stops being comfortable to stand by them, then I don’t think it can be said they ever stood by those ideals in the first place. With all respect, I would say they were just playing make believe until things got real and actually affected them. And the sad part is that it affected them in the most minute of ways.
Perhaps I’m being too dramatic, but it makes me wonder: if people can’t even organize and keep a strike for one week when it requires this little of them, and a lot are succumbing to the smallest of threats (“you will henceforth no longer be allowed to perform free labour for us”), then what’s the point in even trying to organize and change anything in the real world?
I like your idea, but also combine it with the idea behind CatsStandingUp, but each post must be the exact same image, with the exact same title. Make it as boring as possible.
To add extra spice: Everyone who posts or comments gets automatically banned by automod, as participation is working and against community ideals. I have no idea if that breaks any site rules, but it would discourage participation.That’s brilliant, hope to see Reddit turn into nothing but a slew of super-specific protest posts.
You’ll love what r/steam did. They were forced open and from what I hear users are now exclusively posting pictures of water vapor.
I want /r/ music to ban all music except covers of ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ or maybe ‘My Heart Will Go On’.
Only acoustic guitar covers of Wonderwall
