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…
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.
