So how long until they kick legacy mods from r/startrek and reopen?
What it says on the tin, really. I think this is going to be an issue when they get around to the smaller communities... It's going to suck majorly, as most people's default will remain with reddit for community discussion like this...
Splinter the community, I'm going to stay with the people who went through the mess of setting up a new place that isn't beholden to Reddit. It may be forever smaller, but of the 600,000 subscribers, how many of them contribute?
eh, it is what it is, and i'd say not really either. For now, probably nearly everyone that's staying here is probably a contributing member, but if we continue building and promoting this community, then it will get to a sizeable number of lurkers. As long as we don't attract bad actors, or bad actors are dealt with swiftly, it's all good.
Most social media runs by the 90/9/1 rule. 90% of users lurk, 9% of users post, 1% of users produce content.
I'm hoping that this house cleaning changes those numbers up some.
I know that a lot of people are afraid to post. They may not believe that they have anything interesting to say. And they may not trust their ability to write coherently. Some of you folks are intimidatingly good at writing insightful posts and making it understandable to everybody.
Maybe with a smaller community we can encourage more people to take part and, paradoxically, become more diverse.
I'd also like to encourage everybody to attempt to post something interesting. A pet theory. A reinterpretation of a scene. It doesn't really matter. You can only get better by doing and we all benefit from new ideas. Don't be afraid to sound like a fool. It's kinda my default state and I'm still here.
I’d also like to encourage everybody to attempt to post something interesting. A pet theory. A reinterpretation of a scene. It doesn’t really matter. You can only get better by doing and we all benefit from new ideas. Don’t be afraid to sound like a fool. It’s kinda my default state and I’m still here.
How about we post some of our favorite quotes from the series? Here's some of mine :p
“Use the force, Kirk.”
“Help me, Spock. You’re my only hope.”
“Beam me up, Skywalker!”
“This isn’t the Data you’re looking for. Move along.”
“To boldly go where no Jedi has gone before”
“You’ve never heard of the Enterprise? … It’s the ship that made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs.”
Wasn't there a thread on r/startrek today about them deciding to reopen? I was surprised by how many users were pretty angry about it having been closed, tbh. I felt really good about the decision to close, even before I joined Lemmy.
I don't know. I haven't been back since the day the move was announced. So if they have decided to reopen, be it old mods or not, all the power to them. I don't care any more.
The impression I got was that some mods have left and/because the remaining mods have decided to reopen. Honestly the thread was a bit depressing, lots of "it's their platform, they can do what they like" and "who cares, it doesn't affect me". :/
Not that much of a surprise, really. Most of the ones that left would have left, whether for here, elsewhere, or outside. They have no reason to hang about Reddit still.
The "sacking" of the current moderator volunteers that I've seen in some news articles this morning leads me to the next step, which is if a moderator can be tossed, that's a chilling effect for the next moderator and then, all the people who remain subscribed to that subreddit. I don't know if that will actually happen this way, it will at least be a fascinating exploration to see how this all unfolds. Someone on Mastodon mentioned that Reddit makes no content of their own, it's all volunteers, the public, and their 3rd-party toolset. That they are burning all of it and maintaining that everything will be fine in the end. Smells a lot like bravado and big-talk.
I think this is a important take - as far as users are concerned Reddit merely hosts the content and the community, but as far as Reddit is concerned it owns the content and wants to monetise the community.
The problem for Reddit is the moderation is done by users who do it for free, mostly because they love their communities and want to keep them going. Those people are not easy to replace - plenty of communities shut because no one wanted to moderate them, and plenty of users just aren't interested. So if they lose the moderators, there is a small pool of people to replace them and many of those may not be motivated in the same way. There will also be bad actors amongst those untested moderators.
Lose the moderators, and the communities fall apart as bad content, rule breaking and negative behaviour takes hold. The "content" becomes lost and the value of what reddit things it owns falls massively. An archive of old reddit comments is actually not worth much - sure people google things and find answers on Reddit - but it's the current active users and daily content that draws people in.
I think Reddit is doomed as it is failing to understand it's own business and what made the site successful.
Yup. An opinion writer in the Washington Post had a weird analogy yesterday, but it works — Reddit’s business model is almost the same as a thrift store’s. People donate stuff (clothes and furniture to Goodwill, analysis and humor to Reddit). Volunteers sort through it and throw out the bad stuff (volunteers at Goodwill, moderators at Reddit). And the business sells it (Reddit has one extra step here in that it sells ads, so it uses the donated-and-sorted stuff to build an audience to sell).
If the donators and the sorters walk, what do they have to sell?
I read a pretty great write up on Mother Jones about the inevitable enshittification of reddit. Seems like all social media sites are doomed to turn into hot garbage eventually.
Oh, reddit will survive, it'll just be even shittier than before. And maybe it'll bounce back to somewhere close to what it was, but in the meantime, there's now a growing viable alternative.
My recommendation for anyone who decides to visit reddit adopt a comment signature promoting startrek.website along with a link to a new user tutorial and a quick explanation of why we left. Keep picking them off and make our existence common knowledge over there.
Since they are looking for revenue, selling/renting out is quite likely.
I guess everything connected with Disney will be next.
Though I wonder if reddit is still in the grey zone where they can't really enter a relationship with big media conglomerates because their reputation precedes them.
I mean, big mouse will probably not become involved with a company that hosts a lot of pornography.
This is a completely empty threat. Do you think Reddit is capable of replacing the whole moderation teams of 5000+ subreddits in a couple weeks? NO they aren't. Which is exactly why /u/jailbaitlover i mean /u/spez is trying to get singular mods to cross the line so they can boot the rest and put all the moderation on their new scab.
Probably. There's nothing said about how active the moderators have to be, and there are a few who would happily claim the role, even if they aren't going to do anything with it, except to step in when other mods do something they dislike (since Reddit's mod privilege system is hierarchical, higher mods outright lower ones, and can remove them if desired). /r/Tumblr basically had that problem, with the only recently active mod being kicked off by both Reddit, and one of the higher moderators, who opened the sub back up (its back private now, citing a "disinformation campaign", so the users probably rioted, given the support for a shut down). There's a suggestion that it was a Reddit scab who suddenly became active, and booted said mod, but that could be either rumour or fact, since there's not a lot of supporting evidence in either direction, except that said user is not on the site, nor moderator on /r/tumblr any longer.
Reddit does have an issue with "power mods", where a user will just collect moderation roles in subreddits, so there are a few who would probably just add a few new subs to the list.
What happens afterwards probably depends on the user base. While they could probably try and silence dissent, no few people can handle multiple riots going across multiple subs they moderate.
There'll always be people who thrive in that sort of environment. Very recently someone said he was going to block me because I didn't agree with him on how PIC S3 is 'stupid fan pandering and NotTrueTrek' and instead asked what he would suggest as an alternative if in charge. I.e. some people are in it for the ranting and internet fighting.
Yes sadly that is very true. I was the original top mod for /r/StarTrek (I quit last year) and eventually realized I had to make our rules distinguish between "debate" and "arguing", between "constructive" and "un-constructive" speech. It's a difficult line to walk, but if a space makes room for arguing and low-effort bickering like that, it has a way of taking over every topic. Ultimately moderators have to tell people "It's OK to have an opinion but you need to express it constructively and explain why you hold it if you wish to participate".
Same goes for mindless cheerleading too honestly, though it's not quite as toxic. But left unchecked, internet fandoms have a way of dividing into ideological camps with purity standards. I encouraged my mods to maintain a "house party" atmosphere. Let people do their thing, get silly, have drunken debates, etc. But if you see someone acting inappropriately or making it not fun for someone else, time to put on your party host hat and ask them to leave. "You don't have to go home but you can't stay here".
Yes, some mods deleted their accounts and came here permanently, but evidently the remaining mods decided to reopen. This was not expected, but not much we can do about it now.
Yes, but reddit can undo it. A little while back, /r/KotakuInAction was nuked by the head mod, who had not been an active moderator for years. He deleted all content and set the subreddit to private. However, since his actions were malicious and the rest of the mods could only watch since he was above them in the mod order, reddit admins removed him from the mod list and restored the subreddit to before the mod went crazy. This is likely the same logic they'll use to reopen the subs, only it doesn't work since it's not the work of one rogue mod, but the mod team as a whole.
Cannot delete the sub but you can nuke the posts, like r/shadowwar did. As long as it's the act of the entire mod team and not one rogue mod, technically Reddit isn't supposed to step in.
Unfortunately, we know that's not going to be the case.
Most likely, they'll make a way for people to take over subreddits that went private and have no activity for a while, if there isn't one already. r/StarTrek might get special treatment, or it might just be shunted over into a new general policy like this.