Blueberry

Whenever anyone has been quiet for too long, I try to nudge them with “hey, if you’ve been speaking we can’t hear you” - it’s happened to me too many times already

Because Reddit is in the unique position where a small amount of users can affect a vast swathe of their platform - moderators.

Most mods don’t care, by volume. The ones that do are often also the ones that are more active, more engaged, and more entwined with communities outside Reddit.

During the protest last year, polls come back favorably pretty much everywhere to shut down - but after the shutdown actually happened, a tidal wave of lurkers who never vote and never comment came out of the woodwork to complain and call it all stupid. Public opinion of all users is likely against practically any protest that could happen.

I don’t like it, but that’s how it is. The best realistic outcome is that a large contingent of content creators and more informed users leave the site - but how many of those are left that haven’t already vamoosed and are still willing to leave under some unknown worse circumstance?

Not in any way the average user cares much about.

The causal social media user cares for two things:

1. A constant uninterrupted stream of content

2. Dopamine in the form of upvotes/likes/what have you

If these two things aren’t interupted, 90% of users won’t care.

Let’s be honest with ourselves - no, it won’t be wildly unpopular. This change affects very few people and the people still using Reddit at this point likely won’t care much, and I have doubt any future change would cause much outrage either.

Because think about this - who is actively complaining and gnashing their teeth about the continued downward spiral and still scrolling, posting, moderating there at this point? I’d love to believe more people would jump ship - but if it ever happened it would take a far larger-scope fuckup than anything we’ve seen so far.

There is a point where more users may bring more downsides than upsides - but we haven’t reached that point yet. There are still many many niche communities that have no equivalent here and starting them would never take off with the current number of people.

People that don’t check what community a post came from on their home feed and just upvote it if they like it.

Full disclosure: that was me just now until I opened the comments, realized, then took it back. It’s very easy to miss sometimes

Isn’t the way it works now also a debate winner? The blocked user can reply to you and you won’t even know, so you can’t refute whatever they’ve said (and if you’ve blocked them there’s decent odds it isn’t good).

This is what happens when you step on the wrong bug a couple million years ago

In my DnD group, my goblin wizard still holds the honor of being the only party member the DM has used Power Word Kill on.

I’m honored.

Bring a book or some headphones and knock out a podcast. Or drink, whatever works

I hope Lemmy eventually picks up more features like polls. I miss natively embedding polls.

I am subscribed to over 100 channels, ranging from daily uploads to 1 video every few months. Frankly I don’t need more stuff to watch. When I do want to find something new, it’s either a recommendation from a friend, something I saw on a different social media, or something I searched for myself deliberately.

This change isn’t a good thing, it’s Google trying to pressure more people into giving up more data, but the “threat” of them removing their algorithmically recommended content from my feed is not a threat at all, it’s a bonus if anything.

Reminds me of two sessions ago when my druid learned what a donut was for the first time and commended it for “being extremely calorie dense”

I don’t need Lemmy to compete with or kill Reddit. All I wanted was any one platform to get enough of an influx of users to be self-sustaining even after the outrage started to die down, which appears to have been successful.

Allowing bigots a platform leaves the possibility that they band together, upvote each other, and normalize their opinions on your community gradually until people stop questioning it.

Add on to that the fact the OP on reddit directly receives each comment on their post as a notification by default.

I don’t approve of comments that try to make fun of the userbase while removing their ability to respond, to be clear. But here is the alternative perspective as to why threads would be locked:

When I moderated r/polls, we would occasionally lock threads because we literally couldn’t keep up. If it was a topic that particularly drew out the bigots in force, they would pile in faster than we could ban them. A thread like this could get over a thousand comments if it was one of the top ones that day. The solutions were then either:

• Allow bigotry to fester in the thread for extended periods of time
• Have one or more moderators camp on the thread in real time trawling through new comments, perhaps for hours on end
• Lock the thread

This was on a sub of about 200,000 users, with 5-8 mods. There are subreddits with many times this amount of subscribers, so I can only imagine they might have an even lower threshold for locking.

I hope that the mod-user relationship will be healthier here. (Bias, I was a reddit moderator.)

Some reddit mods were crap, this is true. Powermods and sub collectors were real. They did shit up a few communities.

But these people were a very small proportion of all moderators. Most moderators I met were chill, and just wanted to chip in to their respective communities to give back, in a way. Volunteering for internet janitor duty, because no matter how much people use the term as an insult it turns out public spaces need janitors - or they get filled with shit, trash, graffiti (and not the cool kind either, mostly badly drawn swastikas). It’s not a position that should be glorified, or anything, because that’s weird, but I hope that some semblance of basic respect can be maintained here on Lemmy - both ways, meaning no powermods but also no defaulting to assuming mods suck.