Steve Huffman, the Reddit CEO, told NBC News in an interview that a user protest on the site this week is led by a minority of moderators and doesn’t have wide support.
“Congratulations, you’ve just been promoted as the lead moderator of /r/Whatever. We’re going to need you to unlock the subreddit.”
“What? What happened to the other mods?”
“Don’t worry about it. Just unlock the subreddit.”
“Why don’t you just unlock it? You’re the owners, you can do whatever you want.”
“We’re going to need someone to moderate it when it comes back online, and we don’t have the money for that kind of manpower. Please focus, I need you to unlock the subreddit and prepare for the community to come back online.”
“Yeah, I’m not going to do that.”
“That’s unfortunate, but I can’t say I’m surprised.”
You’ve been removed as a Moderator of /r/Whatever
@spaceraser Yep, that’s the script right there. 😒
This is turning out to be even more fascinating than twitter
He’s really doing us all a favor by giving us absolute certainty that ditching reddit is the right move.
@jerry That’s what I thought! I’m bringing 🍿 in for tomorrow’s instalment.
To be honest, I didn’t expect the Reddit CEO to get this defensive about the decision. It seems like with each move he’s just putting more gas on the fire. He probably should have just stayed quite and let the inconvenience of the blackout make the Reddit community shift their anger to the mods to finally open up again.
The assumption here is the CEO is unusually smart
@Zigzagged4044
You are so right. He couldn’t have made it any worse if he’d just stayed quiet.
This is expected. Of course Reddit wasn’t going to allow their subreddits to be hijacked.
I’m glad I deleted my account. Crappy company. Worse CEO.
How to kill a company 101. I think we should take notes from Elon Musk and this clown.
Oh I think it’s the fine rarified air they breathe and Musk, well he has a well known record. /s
That idea of users voting out moderators off their positions if not implemented properly it could be abused. With how many bots and throwaway accounts there are, a voting system for that I don’t see going well.
Maybe I’m missing something, maybe they end up implementing it well. Either way I doubt I’ll back to reddit. I quite like it here.
I feel like the voting system is just an excuse to start removing mods or threatening them with removal. It would be so easy to abuse, and with so many consequences to a mod being removed by vote.
Yeah, this is going to get used to cause bizarre and gross takeovers of subreddits.
spez is really trying hard to speedrun being Elon Musk
I suspect u/spez sees setting it up for abuse is a feature rather than a bug
Spez showing he’s only slightly less of a moron the Musk. Nice.
Well, this is turning out well. Yay Reddit. Yay Fediverse.
Kinda like the romance of a brand new small community.
I’m pretty sure it is widely supported
Strictly speaking, he’s correct that it’s a minority of moderators because there’s a lot of zombie subreddits on there which didn’t take part in the protest. Still not a good look to be picking fights with your biggest contributors.
I’ve seen a lot of suggestions to delete your content before deleting your account, and if you’re in Europe, to file a GDPR data removal request. Since reddit is nothing without the content, that seems like the way to go.
I was going to do that, but then I realized that over half my comments were: “LOL”, so I just deleted my account.
If these rule changes happen, should we login to reddit to vote against spez’s hand-picked mods as needed, (and campaign against them?), or is it best to stay off there still?
