Copy of the post in the event it is deleted or you don't want to give ****it any traffic.
Hey again, /r/PICS!
We have another interesting development for you: /u/ModCodeofConduct still hasn't responded to our request for a public reply... but they have seen fit to threaten us:
This is a final warning for inaccurately labeling your community NSFW which is a violation of the Mod Code of Conduct rule 2. Your subreddit has not historically been considered NSFW nor would they under our current policies.
Please immediately correct the NSFW labeling on your subreddit. Failure to do so will result in action being taken on your moderator team by the end of this week. This means moderators involved in this activity will be removed from this mod team. Moderators may also be subject to additional actions, e.g., losing the ability to join mod teams in the future.
Lastly, if you suddenly begin to post, or approve content that features sexually explicit content to your community in order to justify the NSFW label, we will immediately remove and permanently suspend moderators who have participated in this action.
Needless to say, we responded as you would expect:
Please read and publicly respond to our message addressing this.
We are not in violation of the cited rule as it is written. Moreover, according to Reddit's listed policies, our subreddit is considered NSFW. If these policies are themselves in error, please correct their verbiage immediately. Otherwise, /r/PICS reverting to SFW would itself be in violation of those same policies.
Our team is currently discussing our actions in the meantime. Please permit us some time to reach a consensus.
Maddeningly, /u/ModCodeofConduct is telling us to go against Reddit's listed guidelines, which puts us in something of a pickle: If we follow their commands, we'll be in violation of the site-wide rules... but if adhere to said rules, they'll remove us. /r/InterestingAsFuck is still unmoderated (at the time of this writing), so we can reasonably assume that our removal would effectively kill this community.
Well, we don't want /r/PICS to die, so while we figure out how best to handle the situation (which includes waiting for a public, user-visible response from /u/ModCodeofConduct), we're going to be exploring new ways of ensuring that innocent, unsuspecting users are not presented with offensive content. One possible avenue would see you – yes, you, the upstanding Redditor reading this – having the ability to tag any post that you personally found offensive.
If you have any other ideas, please share them in the comments!
Sorry for the confusion, /r/PICS! We'll get back to you with more soon!
I’m surprised the larger subreddits haven’t called their bluff. People keep talking like thousands are going to line up to moderate subreddits for free.
Where do you source new moderators? Ask the community? Most redditors don’t want to be stuck on hall monitor duty and most of the power users that do enjoy it are the ones protesting. Of the ones you get, you’ll have to slowly check each one to ensure they’re on your side, and not a troll/protester that’s willing to trash the entire subreddit the moment you instate them.
It’s not like their corporate connections will help with this either. They want profitability so they aren’t looking to payroll more people. How you drum up 20, unpaid volunteers to moderate a subreddit all day every day? How do you drum up 1000+ to cover a complete walkout.
You can’t do that overnight. It would take time. Even if they give these to established powermods, the span of control will just be too large to manage. The big subreddits just need to call reddit on their bluff. They need to all resign simultaneously and force reddit into this bad position, where most of the platform goes unmoderated for weeks.
That's what I've been saying. Let the admin remove some mods from a subreddit like r/pics with millions of users. I guarantee anyone the appoint will be very done with modding within a week. It's rich that reddit is threatening to remove any porn posted to r/pics right now, since that will literally become the norm if moderators get removed.
It's like they expect mods to just appear out of thin air and act the same way as the current mods do
As soon as a big sub goes unmodded call in the NSFW brigades.
A good old porn raid eh? I love it.
A boobies blitzkrieg.
Nsfw images with spez photoshopped? Hmmm maybe today Satan.
Yeah this has been the most obvious answer. The Reddit mods should walk, en masse. If spez wants to be like musk so bad then let him have it. Completely unregulated subreddits going to absolute shit. Advertisers pulling out. Just stop helping them run their own website and it will run right into the ground. Fuck ‘em, they killed all good will this go around and when called on it they’ve doubled and tripled down. I’ve got zero sympathy.
Coordinate it, so they all walk at the same time. Nuke the automod rules too. Coordinate it off Reddit.
I want to watch the absolute garbage fire that would ensue if the mod teams responsible for moderating probably tens of thousands of rule violating posts every day just walked away.
I doubt it would ever happen because the people who do that job for free usually don't have much else going on. It's hard to walk away from the thing that gives you purpose, a sense of belonging to a community and a feeling of power, no matter how sad that might sound.
IIRC from when I was modding, the automod rules have a history function so even if they were deleted, the new mods could see and reinstate the rules quite easily.
If I recall correctly (it's been 84 years...), the history only shows the last changes. (I think it was 50, but I'm not sure.) So the mods could theoretically erase the automod rules, then submit a bunch of dummy changes, and the automod rules won't be recoverable.
Ah, that does make sense. Bit of a shame, though.
It gets worse.
One of the reasons why those Reddit powermods are in power is because they're willing to moderate a subreddit for 8h, 12h, perhaps even 16h a day. They take it as a job; the replacements won't, at most they'll be willing to check the sub twice a day and that's it.
So to replace every single of those powermods you'll need at least a half dozen new mods. Good luck finding them, Reddit! And if Reddit does find such huge amount of mods, you'll get huge mod teams that will be fucking hell for the users and the mods themselves.
People will line up to do it for free, but not to the level Reddit would expect them to. When communities get too many problematic posts Reddit will scold the mods and expect them to do better. It's foolish that they threaten to remove the mods.
FInding willing scabs wouldn't be hard, finding willing competent ones would be.
Small niche subs would probably be fine, but any of the big megasubs would be a trashfire. It's why I wish every sub did what Interestingasfuck did. They showed exactly what the sub would look like unmoderated and stuck to it.
I'm out of the loop - what happened with/r/interestingasfuck?
Mods went basically hands off, the only things they would moderate are things that broke site-wide rules like child pornography. Anything else at all was fair game. It was a pretty good view of what unmoderated reddit would look like.
After the usual threats, mods didn't budge so were removed by admins I believe. Last I heard the place was still an unmoderated glorious trash fire.
Good.
Yeah, my general rule was always that 1/4 of new mods will last more than a few months. Like 1/10 will pass the two year mark
I looked at that mod code of conduct account and they're posting a bunch of "who wants to be mod here" in a lot of subreddits.
I think thousands would line up to moderate... But they have no idea what that entails and would quickly lose control
I just hope loads of the people lining up to replace them are also anti-spez and wait just long enough to make them feel comfortable before they start protesting themselves.
I don't even want the pressure of moderating a niche lemmy sub I don't know who has the energy and time for large subreddit moderation
I was a mod on a larger subreddit (~4 million users) and it was honestly as boring as you’d expect. The most fun was just hanging out with the other mods because they were fun people, but they might as well have been someone I met doing an activity that was actually enjoyable. I lasted about 4 months before quitting, because I found myself spending more time moderating than studying, which didn’t seem like a healthy way to spend my life.