Reddit Kicks Out Protesting Mods, As Reddit Users Continue To Find Creative Ways To Protest

Failures

from the very-democracy,-much-freedom dept

Reddit CEO’s insistence that the protests from Reddit would simply “pass” certainly hasn’t come to pass just yet. While increasing pressure from the company against protest mods has resulted in some backing down, many are continuing to engage in malicious compliance, making it clear they’re still protesting.

And, a few days ago, after many threats along those lines, Reddit finally started removing protesting mods.

Three former moderators of r/malefashionadvice tell The Verge that they were removed from the subreddit on Thursday. “We more or less have been expecting the removal for the past few days,” one former mod, who asked to go by “Walker,” says in an email to The Verge. Now, the community’s modlist currently has just one moderator: ModCodeofConduct.

ModCodeofConduct is the account used by Reddit employees to share information for mods. In other words, Reddit removed the volunteer moderators and inserted its own employees to run the subreddit. Remember when Steve Huffman called volunteer moderators the “landed gentry?” This is kind of like if the king killed the “landed gentry” and gave their lands to his own kids.

And that wasn’t the only subreddit. According to Jay Peters at The Verge:

As of this writing, ModCodeofConduct is also the sole moderator of:

• r/ShittyLifeProTips (though ModCodeofConduct posted an open call on Thursday for new mods that has gotten some, uh, snarky responses)
• r/AccidentalRenaissance (which was private as of last week after its moderators resigned)
• r/oldbabies (pictures of babies with faces that look like old people)
• r/BeardAdvice (according to the Reddark tracker, this community participated in the recent blackouts)
• r/plumbingporn (also participated in the recent blackouts, per the Reddark tracker)
• r/fordtransit (a community dedicated to Ford Transit cargo vans)

Reddit officials (and their Iraqi Ministry of Information-style spokesperson) are still trying to claim this has nothing at all to do with silencing protests.

“We are, and have been, enforcing the moderator Code of Conduct. This is not new because of the protests,” a Reddit spokesperson told Engadget. Under its guidelines, Reddit considers a public community that has indefinitely been made private to be “abandoned,” and it seeks “new mods who want to reinvigorate it.” The spokesperson added that “we have a practice of reactivating private, high-subscriber communities that are being ‘camped’ on.” 

Look. No one who wasn’t born yesterday believes any of that. These subreddits haven’t been “abandoned.” They’re protesting. Often after having their subscribers take a vote on how best to handle Reddit’s terrible decisions. So, yes, this is new and yes this is because of the protests, and the least that Reddit could do would be to admit reality. Denying it is a bad look.

At least one Reddit employee, apparently Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler (using Go_JasonWaterfalls on Reddit) seemed to finally acknowledge that the company fucked up, and posted in r/modnews trying to smooth things over:

So, we’ve all had a… time on Reddit lately. And I’m here to recognize it, acknowledge that our relationship has been tested, and begin the “now what?” conversation.

Moderators are a vital part of Reddit. You are leaders and stewards of your communities. You are also not a monolith; mods have a diverse set of needs to support the purpose of each community you foster. Our role is facilitation; to enable all of you with a platform you can rely on, and with the tools and resources you need to cultivate thriving communities. Tens of thousands of mods engage daily on Reddit and, in order to enable all of you, we need consistent, inclusive, and direct connection with you. Here are some ways to connect with us.

I’d say that… it did not go over all that well. Here’s just one response, and there were many more like this:

Your CEO called us “landed gentry” and accused us of failing to care about the communities that we built, which Reddit profits off of without paying us for our work; and then when a bunch of mods directly polled users for what they would like to do and then followed through with the results the moderators were forcibly removed from the communities because the CEO didn’t like it.

So, I wouldn’t say the relationship was tested, I would say it was tenuous to begin with and Spez shat on whatever goodwill and benefit of the doubt that we tried to offer. If the CEO of the company wasn’t interested in hearing what we have to say, I have zero confidence that anybody else cares about our “needs.” Or, if you do care, that you are in a position to do anything. We made our “needs” pretty damn clear over the past two months. Why weren’t you listening then? We’ve made our needs clear for the last decade and had to turn to third-party apps and tools to make up for the deficiencies that you’ve been promising us for years. Why didn’t you make any changes then?

What I need is a functional app that doesn’t randomly freeze up, doesn’t spam me with more ads than cable TV and has basic functions.

And… the protests are continuing. In what maybe Reddit brass thought was a good idea, they reopened r/place. r/place is, normally, a giant collaborative art project on Reddit, in which users can place one pixel on a giant canvas every five minutes, and lasts for a few days before closing. It was used twice before, both times on April Fools Day (in 2017 and again in 2022). So it was a bit weird for Reddit to relaunch it randomly in July, but it seemed to be an attempt at “hey, we’re all cool here, nothing’s gone wrong.” In other words, it was desperation.

Redditors made use of the canvas to, well, express their displeasure with Huffman (who goes by /spez on the site). People spent their pixels wisely creating many, many “Fuck Spez” messages on the canvas:

You can watch a timelapse video of how it changes over time. At about 45 seconds in, the canvas is expanded, and almost immediately a ton of new “fuck spez” messages show up:

I don’t think attempting to paper over the failings of the company leadership with distractions like this is going to work all that well.

Filed Under: landed gentry, mods, protests, r/place, steve huffman, takeovers
Companies: reddit