Wasn't vice supposed to die or something? Well thankfully they haven't because this article is such a great treat
How the situation is resolved will determine the direction of one of the last good social media sites and will impact how people interact with it. A complex argument over the specifics of API pricing is, actually, a battle for the soul of the human internet, and an important labor dispute that will partially determine whether people or corporations control the internet.
CEO Steve Huffman is playing a dangerous game which threatens to break huge portions of the site, as well as the apps that millions of people use to access it (nontrivially, Reddit is also imperiling its status as a destination for porn).
not the fricking pr0n how will I coom now
βThis one feels decisively larger, better coordinated, and more impactful,β than past protests, said Stevie Chancellor, a former Reddit moderator and current assistant professor in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Minnesota who studies Reddit and social media moderation, in an interview with Motherboard.
for all of its flaws, is a very good website, one of the last major websites whose day-to-day activities are largely governed by its users rather than being controlled exclusively by an engagement algorithm, top-down moderation rules, and megalomaniacal billionaires.
being jannied by agp deadbeats is so much better dummy
... blah blah blah words words words ...
Even if many moderators like what they do and enjoy some of the power that comes with moderating and guiding a community, they bring unmistakeable monetary value to Reddit the corporation. Li was the lead author of a paper published last year that found Reddit moderators work at least a collective 466 hours per day, which would cost Reddit a minimum of $3.4 million a year at a wage of $20/hour.
and yet THEY DO IT FOR FREE
βWe traditionally think of all this volunteer work as a labor of love. But at the same time, this is really valuable labor for companies, and the moderators go through so much stress and pressure, and trauma to do this work.β
pat yourselves on the back for traumatizing jannies
So, there is a version of this story where, in a quest for profitability, Reddit essentially exerts dictatorial power, ignores its moderators, makes it more difficult to view porn on its site, screws over blind people, and centralizes power and attention around its official app at the expense of the much better apps many people use to access the site.
never has spaz sounded so cool
anyway
I recommend at least skimming the article as it's unintentionally hilarious but um I hope you liked the quotes I picked out
r/technology thread (funny)
A 17 year old Reddit mod wrote this
and all the other comments are basically the same
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
What does this mean? The millions of subs on Reddit only take 466 daily hours to moderate combined???
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
most of the millions of subs get 1-3 posts a day there so not super surprising. Guessing about 100 subs make up 450 hrs of the """""labor""""" and the other million-100 subs take up 16hrs. I follow a small sub (maybe 20 posts a day with ~3 actual 'posts' and 17 posts that are people asking simple questions that get 2 comments) and its even in the top 1% of subreddits.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
at 16 hours a day queen bardfinn
is doing 3% of all moderation on reddit
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Does that include time for makeup, and writing preachy longposts?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
No
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
Record is 1 days 10 hours 08 minutes and 36 seconds by beamrifle
longest streak broken in the last 7 days was ThermonuclearNecrostorm which was 0 days 11 hours 51 minutes and 25 seconds
Best friend is ACA with 217 mentions
rdrama is currently running at 282.407 Β΅Bardyhertz with 4702 total mentions since 2022-09-24
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
Yes. Despite all the recent lambasting of AI for potentially taking jobs, AutoModerator has existed for years
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
It says "at least". The actual number is closer to 293k daily hours
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
In the ballpark really
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
It's just a lower bound the estimation for the upper bound is in the billions
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Lil bit of rounding
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
More options
Context
They only looked at mod logs. They also only looked at a subset of subs & mods and estimated it over all of reddit (though their numbers for that seem to be fine at the 1st glance). They also obviously removed bot actions.
But yes, it does mean exactly that. "This weighting process yielded a mean value of 80 seconds per day. This weighted mean corresponds to a sum of 359 to 611 hours by the whole population at the 95% confidence interval".
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
jfl
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context
Also apparently the cost for actually hiring on enough jannies to do it not for free would be a drop in the bucket for a company the size of reddit.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
Explains /r/antiwork tbh
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
More options
Context
More options
Context