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Antiwork mods should quiet quit. Sit back and let the house burn down.
You gotta appreciate the irony of Reddit demanding free labor from mods of a sub that is about labor abuse.
It baffles me that they even used the word “expectations.” Like… ‘ma’am… I am not being paid. Do not have ANY expectations.’
The longer this goes the more it reads like the onion.
More ironic that the mod team agreed.
They should reopen and just stop doing any moderation beyond the bare minimum to keep the sub.
TBH that would make the sub significantly better
Irony
They weren’t forced to reopen. They were threatened with being replaced. Who gives a shit? One can’t even call this cowardly. Who fears losing an unpaid job? This is just pathetic. So much for solidarity. The r/Videos mod team called this from the beginning. They’re prepared to go down with the ship. Of course this would be the natural outcome of a prolonged strike. This is really separating the performative virtue signalling from those who care.
I’m not and never have been a mod. But can understand the conflict of not wanting to reopen but if you don’t you lose a position that you’ve spent a lot of time and energy. They’re probably passionate about their community. Giving that away and seeing someone else destroy all your hard work? Glad I’m not that invested.
Don’t forget the addiction to power. Yes, there are all kinds of moderators.
This is such a common attitude, and it’s nonsense. Non-moderators think moderators are “power hungry” when they ban people. While there are some few exceptions, moderators don’t ban people because they like power. Moderators ban people because they’re disruptive and causing trouble.
What moderating is really like, part 1
What moderating is really like, part 2
99% of the people I’ve banned who were not obvious spammers or bots are one kind of troll or another. Usually they fall into three categories: Concern Trolls (“But I’m only saying this for your own good!”), Factoid Trolls (“I’m here to tell you the TRUTH!”), or Disruptive Trolls (dick picks, offensive memes, slurs and racism, etc.).
Roughly 1% of the people I ban apologize for their mistake, remove their rule-breaking content, and either follow the rules or quietly leave.
I regularly get called a power-hungry mod by the crybabies who get angry when they aren’t allowed to break the very clearly stated rules, and repeat their offenses after getting first, sometimes second warnings. They run to other places and go try to stir up other crybabies to come and cause the same kind of trouble.
Moderating is tireless and endless. Jerks don’t get banned for saying “Dur the mods suck! Free Speech!” Jerks get banned because they think the rules are for other people, or because they think that the rules are wrong so that means they don’t have to follow them.
Thank you for coming to my Moose Talk. (Ted is taking a nap right now.)
No need to get offended just because I mentioned one of the valid reasons.
Different platform, but exactly the same deal moderating Twitch chats. I think my favorite insult that I’ve received was that I was personally “the downfall of Western civilization.”
The upshot to those disruptions happening in an active chat like that though is that everyone sees how much of a knob that person is being and is perfectly happy to see them gone.
Eh, I have had mixed results.
There are also moderators that ban out of some weird form of spite/echo chamber enforcement.
Ive seen some examples of feminist / human rights forums/subreddits that had it explicitly in their rules that hate speech and attacking people based on gender was against the rules. Someone was going on a long hate filled speech about how all men are trash and terrible, and I just reported it to the moderators that it broke the rule and I proceeded to get banned for making the report (not even engaging with the chat, just reporting)
I also got banned from /r/askscience during the late stages of COVID and was accused of being an antivaxer by the moderator… Thing is I am extremely pro-vaccines, lol
The reason I got banned? Someone posted some faulty stats interpretations of information and I posted the correction, giving an example case to demonstrate how there was a hole on their claim. Largely speaking they were, in a damaging way, accrediting assumed success to vaccines that wasnt quite proven yet, and I was just like “Well we’d need to the info for X/Y/Z to make that assumption, its very possible but we are missing key info”
Moderator sent me this lol:
We don’t allow conspiracy anti-vaxx nonsense here. Your understanding of stats in general is incredibly flawed.
So yeah, sometimes you just have moderators that are complete assholes and genuinely seem interested in enforcing some kind of weird echo chamber deal, where rationality is not supported.
That one in particular sticks out to me because you’d think that a place like /r/askscience would be understanding of calling stuff out like confirmation biases… >_>;
It’s called the sunk cost fallacy. “I can’t possibly quit because I’ve put so much time/money/effort into this.”
True, but there is a real danger of changing the tone and direction of a sub with a mod swap. That sub has gone through it.
The utter irony of r/AntiWork being forced to reopen is astounding. Strike broken. Union busted. It’s over.
I wonder why they’re forcing open not particularly advertiser friendly subs like piracy and antiwork?
Possibly conspiratorial thinking on my part, but the first reason I can think of is that those subs are both popular enough that they wouldn’t want them fully migrating off reddit/closed forever, but also the kind of sub to not go along with unpopular decisions/ cause trouble. If you were looking to force a few subs open to serve as an example to mods of other subs that they must reopen or be replaced, you’d want to choose ones that aren’t as likely to reopen on their own anyway after awhile, and who’s moderation team you might want to replace, as you now have an excuse and the people who would get mad already are.
I wonder if it’s because they know the first few subs to be forced open will make headlines, but the second batch most likely won’t. So by starting with fringe subs it paints the picture that’s it’s not the bigger or more important subs that are participating in the blackout.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see the /r/antiwork mod’s disastrous appearance on Fox News become a talking point again paired with this, so that when people hear “Reddit forces mods to…” that’s the sort of person the public pictures.
I like what /r/pics did.
We – the so-called “landed gentry” – appreciate that Reddit is made great by its users. Uncompensated contributors populate the platform’s many communities with their content, just as volunteer moderators keep spam and bigotry at bay. Since neither we nor Reddit would be here without you, it was only fair to let you determine what /r/Pics should include… and you overwhelmingly chose to feature only images of John Oliver looking sexy. (Seriously, the final vote was -2,329 to 37,331.)
As such, /r/Pics will henceforth feature only images of John Oliver looking sexy.
It’s great, have a scroll. No intent to derail, here’s the thread on [email protected]: https://lemmy.world/post/206467
I wonder if a similar stunt would have been possible for /r/antiwork. Any ideas? How about: “You must rest on weekdays. Posts and comments are only allowed on weekends.”
You are only allowed to Upload pictures of not doing work
That’s brilliant, hope to see Reddit turn into nothing but a slew of super-specific protest posts.
You’ll love what r/steam did. They were forced open and from what I hear users are now exclusively posting pictures of water vapor.
I want /r/ music to ban all music except covers of ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ or maybe ‘My Heart Will Go On’.
Only acoustic guitar covers of Wonderwall
I’m amazed it’s not this song
I like your idea, but also combine it with the idea behind CatsStandingUp, but each post must be the exact same image, with the exact same title. Make it as boring as possible.
To add extra spice: Everyone who posts or comments gets automatically banned by automod, as participation is working and against community ideals. I have no idea if that breaks any site rules, but it would discourage participation.I hate to be a party pooper, but I really can’t see how the subreddits doing things like that are in any way a protest.
I highly doubt Reddit cares what anyone is posting pictures of as long as they are legal, and the engagement is high. The only way to post them is to engage with Reddit, whether on their website, through the official app, or through a third party app that has to pay Reddit money to use the API. That’s exactly what Reddit wants.
And as for the mods: in a real life scenario, I can see how the threat of being replaced is scary because it means losing your income… but here? They were doing free labour, and as soon as Reddit threatened to take away their power over a corner of the internet, they immediately gave in and proceeded to encourage their audience to “protest” by engaging with Reddit.
I think it would have been several times more effective if the mods just all quit, and everyone who is “protesting” by engaging with Reddit in one form or another (posting, commenting, or just looking and upvoting) just left. I really doubt Reddit is even worried about what is happening now.
people go to reddit for the content. if the content isn’t on reddit anymore, they will end up elsewhere. filling reddit up with content that nobody really cares about will dissuade people from using reddit.
I really think the point is that posting useless content that actively protests the platform and makes it less valuable and interesting should make it hard for Reddit to show investors that their platform is worth money as they go public, which is why the whole thing started in the first place.
I think the point is this dissuades lurkers, as it’s boring.
The lurkers are the ones upvoting. I’m certain that not posting content would be much more boring. What would lurkers do with a drought of content?
To be completely honest, all of these just sound like a lot of excuses for people to toss their alleged ideals and values aside and keep using Reddit, while soothing their conscience by pretending they are still doing something.
And I say “alleged ideals” because if one drops them as soon as they encounter any resistance and it stops being comfortable to stand by them, then I don’t think it can be said they ever stood by those ideals in the first place. With all respect, I would say they were just playing make believe until things got real and actually affected them. And the sad part is that it affected them in the most minute of ways.
Perhaps I’m being too dramatic, but it makes me wonder: if people can’t even organize and keep a strike for one week when it requires this little of them, and a lot are succumbing to the smallest of threats (“you will henceforth no longer be allowed to perform free labour for us”), then what’s the point in even trying to organize and change anything in the real world?
They were not forced, they were pressured. The mods caved to the threat of being replaced, showing everyone that having that little bit of power was always their main priority. I didn’t expect more from dog-walkers.
Yes everyone against labor abuse is a dog walker basement dweller.
No, just the ones on antiwork
The general themes on r/antiwork helped me leave a job after being disrespected after asking for a fair raise. That led to switching careers into data science and doubling me salary and doing far more meaningful work. There, I met a colleague, a 45 year old woman, and we were talking about pay equity and our current workplace, and she brought up to ME that she followed antiwork during COVID and how it also helped her realize her self-worth. She’s now moved and found an even better opportunity.
It’s mega cringe a lot of the time, and the value drops off after a month or two of following I’d say, but overall I think it was a force for good. At least in two people’s lives.
Right, but what’s their alternative? While they’re still mods they can still affect some level of change. If they completely cede to Reddit’s admin, they have nothing.
While they’re still mods they can still affect some level of change.
If they can’t endure even a 1 week strike on a social network then they cannot affect any change anyway because they are a completely powerless farce. Imagine how quickly they’d fold if this were a RL thing with actual consequences beyond their moderator position.
I mean have we forgotten when last year the mod of that sub went to a live interview and the whole subreddit was so ashamed they had to distance themselves from it? I think the day later they said nobody will interview anymore and they removed the person as a mod and wiped any trace of it? They are a joke, this is just another event that proves it.
It’s like, come on AntiWork, you had one job. Or none job. You know what I mean.
Federation isn’t like email at all. I don’t know why people keep saying that. You’ll never get a message saying “we’re not receiving email from this server today” unless something has gone horribly wrong.
Email also doesn’t hang with a green loading circle for hours when you try to log in.
Smaller domains are blocked all the time, ask your local email admin… just because you’re not getting messages about it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen
There are blacklisted email servers. And when email started you had loading circle for the whole internet.
No, that was pretty much how email worked for a long time. And IRC.
I remember someone even making a song “I am going to ban your domain” to the tune of “they’re coming to take me away” to mock sysadmins who took this drastic measure too quickly.
Some university servers would block all email from abroad except for some whitelisted servers. My school blocked emails from another school because the students were badly policed and would just harrass other schools.
Some domains were universally blockdd because they were used by spammers and scammers.
This mostly softened into spam folders and increasingly sophisticated filtering, which is dominating today.
Spam filtering on email is defederation. It’s just in the background and isn’t talked much about because it’s been automated quite a lot. But at the end of the day it’s still writing domain names into blacklist, essentially defederating from those domains.
As someone who runs multiple email servers, this is exactly how it works.
Some email providers will randomly or purposely block emails I sent to them. I get arbitrary blocks or dropped emails on sent emails.
I think others are noting how it can be like this. In my experience:
- My kids’ school accounts can only send emails to and receive emails from their teachers’ email addresses. All other emails, including those from fellow students, are blocked.
- I frequently have issues with whitelisted email addresses at work. They sometimes are blocked and I have to go through the tedious whitelisting process all over again.
Email has the same problems as federated lemmy servers.
Mail Servers can end up on distrubuted blacklists and unable to communicate with each other. When office 365 has an outage it causes huge problems because it’s a single large provider having issues. That provider goes down but not email as a whole.
This is the same as what happened about a week ago when lemmy.ml and lemmy.world went down due to load.
Mods are forced to work
Nah it’s just power addiction. They can stop any time.
You keep repeating that. Just how many times have you been banned on Reddit? I’m guessing a lot.
Unreal stuff. It looks like spez thinks the PR cannot get any worse so he may as well go full scorched earth.
oh, the irony
Why don’t they move here? They are being exploited there anyways
And give up their power as mods of a large subreddit and starting again from scratch? Most of them probably aren’t willing to do that.
I’m a mod of /r/Disneyland, and we recreated our sub over here on Kbin ( @Disneyland, https://kbin.social/m/Disneyland).
The issue is that we had 500k subs on Reddit. That sounds like a lot, but in reality it equates to about a dozen posts a day, maybe less.
Over here on Kbin, we almost have 100 subs - and I’m really proud of that! - but 100 subs is basically nothing. A fraction of a percent of people are actually content contributors, and the whole community rests on them. Then combine that with the fact that we’re a niche subject (not some general thing like “video games”) and that impacts what can be contributed.
On top of that, the magazine is fairly empty. Not barren - we have a few posts - but it certainly looks and feels empty. And because it’s empty, nobody wants to post, which means it stays empty.
Compare that to Reddit, which has a very dedicated community for us. Not a massive community, but certainly a passionate one. We care about our community; we’ve stewarded it for years. All of us mods started out as members of that community (the subreddit founder is long gone), and we’re all unpaid volunteers that want to keep that community healthy.
Reddit threatened to take it from us and give it to another mod team for a related Disney subreddit that played along with the admins. The issue is that multiple Disney subreddits have, uh, issues with those mods (which has been the case for years to the point where explaining the history is part of onboarding for a lot of Disney mods).
So the issue was reframed - either we reopen our sub on our terms… or we stick to our guns, force Reddit to remove us, and get replaced by a different mod team. This other team is known to be harsh about banning users for any kind of dissent, they abuse their mod powers to spread anti-vax nonsense all over their “non-political” subreddit, they have multiple subreddit drama threads talking about their actions, they’ve been gunning for all of the Disney subs for years… and they’d immediately jump at the chance to reopen the subreddit we’ve worked hard on so they could run it their way.
When you look at it like that… there’s only one real choice. I hate Reddit, but our community doesn’t deserve that.
I realize saying “we choose to keep our powers for your own good” makes me sound like, oh, I dunno, “landed gentry”… but users don’t see that side of moderation or Reddit drama, and frankly they shouldn’t have to.
So we opened and are taking the abuse. Users are torn between “you caved, scabs” and “told you this was a useless gesture, how dare you take my sub away”. Neither one is great.
But there’s more to it than what appears on the surface, and frankly that’s true across a lot of subs.
Do you have any plans to start redirecting users to your new spot, while keeping the subreddit open?
If these subreddits all had a sticky thread linking to their new magazines/communities on other platforms, then it would help them grow.
But they don’t. They just make a copy/paste post about reddit killing 3rd party apps and “go use alternatives”, most people need directly linking to them with a simple description of how they work.
We do have a sticky thread that mentions our Kbin community at the very top.
It’s also at the top of our sidebar, above the rules.
Could you add something on the post submission page suggesting that folks also submit their content to your kbin community? Maybe don’t push to completely move, just suggest that content submissions go to both places for now.
Pretty sure most of the more anarchist mods got pushed out sometime after the whole Fox News debacle already and since then the content has become less spicy too. Watering all that down again, what is even left? “Please master spez I would like to slightly criticise a corporation, am I allowed to do this or is it against the guidelines and duties of moderators?” or what.
Well, it is all for the best, free thinking people will migrate and rebuild, the rest I won‘t miss.
99% of what made it to /all from there was pretty much “I hate my manager”
I enjoyed the underlying anarchist texts to the movement like Bullshit Jobs by Graeber, The Abolition of Work by Bob Black etc. but yeah discussion of that was minimal and the more people arrived the less there was and I‘m also sure none of that ever made it to r/all.
Ironically, I have a great manager and wonderful job, I just dislike the system as a whole due to a) people around me suffering b) bad experiences growing up I been exploited with internships as somewhat of a cleaner. Thus I like our cleaners more than the CEO and if I were in charge I‘d pay them better too.
Anyway, the biggest advocates for r/antiwork in my mind aren‘t some mods, it‘s actually people like Musk or spez who can‘t help but treat anyone working class like trash and rabble. They push this mentality of everyone should kiss their feet or they deserve to become homeless. As long as they are around, such a movement will persist. I mean it even exists in supposedly-communist China with tang ping and they try to censor it a lot harder, haha good luck! Either they treat people well and foster a positive and engaging work culture or a counterculture arises naturally.
Sorry, now I went off on a tangent all just from this little comment!
