The funny thing is that Spez didn’t even come up with the idea of Reddit. Him and Ohanian showed up with some other dumb idea and Paul Graham was like, that’s stupid, try this idea of mine.
Then Spez put together some shitty code in Lisp of all languages, which Aaron Schwartz had to rewrite in Python. The site was so unstable that Spez slept with his laptop so he could reboot it in the middle of the night.
They used sock puppets because nobody was posting enough content. Then they cashed out and fucked off, leaving Aaron to rewrite it, and Erik Martin to actually make a proper community out of it.
Then Spez comes riding back into town over a decade later to claim credit while he fucks the whole site up by selling out.
Truly a masterclass in incompetent white male privilege.
See, I was about to agree with your comment but then you had to go and fuck it up with your last sentence. What does the color of his skin have to do with him being a jerk?
On the teenage mod thing, I have a bit of insight-
So basically modding on Reddit sucks. You feel like you have zero support for a volunteer position and it genuinely becomes taxing. I moderated a large subreddit (4 mill+ subs) for a few years alongside 2 smaller (still 100k+) ones. Both of these were exhausting and I ended up letting auto mod do half the work.
I got invited by a friend to moderate a default subreddit. I lasted less than a week. The types of things people post on there that the users never see is horrifying and whenever I can afford therapy it will be getting brought up. I’m talking early 2000s gore sites level shit in addition to the buckets of CSAM.
I started moderating one of the smaller communities back in high school. Let me tell you, my time was worthless back then and I was on top of everything. Once college started, that slowed down a lot and setting up auto mod for the common stuff became entirely necessary. Once I graduated, I suddenly had zero want to moderate. I barely touched anything and automated 99% of my tasks.
Basically what I’m trying to say is that moderating defaults is damn near a full time job, and most of us adults just don’t want to do it. I know I sure as hell didn’t.
And let me tell you, some of the mods on there get just an awful break. Almost all of them are just people trying to build communities, many of whom have no idea how, especially once they get big. The real people to watch out for are the mods no one knows the name of. I know for a fact that many power mods were completely unknown. They used dozens of sock puppets to moderate hundreds of communities, all of them aggregated in private discords. I managed to find a wild invite to one once, but I got booted before I could start taking screenshots
Really not meaning to call out anybody, I haven’t encountered this much here on lemmy, but you often find those sort of attitudes with unpaid “jobs” online. Mods everywhere, wiki editors (incredibly territorial and clique-ish), etc.
There has to be the right mixture of passion, desire for control, and most importantly the free time to put into it. Also have to toss in the strong belief in your own idea of how the space you oversee should be. The free time part often leads to people without much better to do with their time/lives taking up the reins.
If the team is able to develop tools to reduce the time expenditure, or the userbase is small enough that things don’t tend to get overwhelming (almost all of lemmy), you don’t see it. But yeah, the big reddit subs, especially now with the third party API ban killing the overwhelming amount of available mod tools… it’s a real tempest in a teacup over there.
Again, most lemmy mods are great, with only a few notable exceptions. Thankfully it’s astoundingly easy to block users and communites on the fediverse, and usually you can find the same community topic on another instance and not miss out on much. Love this place.
and usually you can find the same community topic on another instance and not miss out on much
One of the worst things about Reddit is that you have some subs that are basically “too big to fail.” You have THE sub for a specific topic. Unless it’s really a niche topic with a small community to begin with, this is not a good thing.
If the sub has bad mods, you’re out of luck. Or you have a bad knock-off sub that gets like 1% of the traffic.
Take it with a grain of salt, there are lots of pure falsehoods stated there. For example, Spez’s first stint in Reddit lasted two years longer than Swartz was involved (2007 for Swartz, 2009 for Spez).
The funny thing is that Spez didn’t even come up with the idea of Reddit. Him and Ohanian showed up with some other dumb idea and Paul Graham was like, that’s stupid, try this idea of mine.
Then Spez put together some shitty code in Lisp of all languages, which Aaron Schwartz had to rewrite in Python. The site was so unstable that Spez slept with his laptop so he could reboot it in the middle of the night.
They used sock puppets because nobody was posting enough content. Then they cashed out and fucked off, leaving Aaron to rewrite it, and Erik Martin to actually make a proper community out of it.
Then Spez comes riding back into town over a decade later to claim credit while he fucks the whole site up by selling out.
Truly a masterclass in incompetent white male privilege.
Kind of a weird flex when they’re all white males.
It’s hip to be racist against white people, did you forget? /s
But he is The Whitest…
sound of washing machine detergent race
See, I was about to agree with your comment but then you had to go and fuck it up with your last sentence. What does the color of his skin have to do with him being a jerk?
Nothing. Don’t see how any other colour skinned person couldn’t have done the same thing.
I miss Aaron Swartz. Spez is so greedy and incompetent.
Also many of the mods on default subs, not all, are literal teenagers lacking a modicum of reason or maturity I swear. Not the brightest bulbs.
On the teenage mod thing, I have a bit of insight-
So basically modding on Reddit sucks. You feel like you have zero support for a volunteer position and it genuinely becomes taxing. I moderated a large subreddit (4 mill+ subs) for a few years alongside 2 smaller (still 100k+) ones. Both of these were exhausting and I ended up letting auto mod do half the work.
I got invited by a friend to moderate a default subreddit. I lasted less than a week. The types of things people post on there that the users never see is horrifying and whenever I can afford therapy it will be getting brought up. I’m talking early 2000s gore sites level shit in addition to the buckets of CSAM.
I started moderating one of the smaller communities back in high school. Let me tell you, my time was worthless back then and I was on top of everything. Once college started, that slowed down a lot and setting up auto mod for the common stuff became entirely necessary. Once I graduated, I suddenly had zero want to moderate. I barely touched anything and automated 99% of my tasks.
Basically what I’m trying to say is that moderating defaults is damn near a full time job, and most of us adults just don’t want to do it. I know I sure as hell didn’t.
And let me tell you, some of the mods on there get just an awful break. Almost all of them are just people trying to build communities, many of whom have no idea how, especially once they get big. The real people to watch out for are the mods no one knows the name of. I know for a fact that many power mods were completely unknown. They used dozens of sock puppets to moderate hundreds of communities, all of them aggregated in private discords. I managed to find a wild invite to one once, but I got booted before I could start taking screenshots
Really not meaning to call out anybody, I haven’t encountered this much here on lemmy, but you often find those sort of attitudes with unpaid “jobs” online. Mods everywhere, wiki editors (incredibly territorial and clique-ish), etc.
There has to be the right mixture of passion, desire for control, and most importantly the free time to put into it. Also have to toss in the strong belief in your own idea of how the space you oversee should be. The free time part often leads to people without much better to do with their time/lives taking up the reins.
If the team is able to develop tools to reduce the time expenditure, or the userbase is small enough that things don’t tend to get overwhelming (almost all of lemmy), you don’t see it. But yeah, the big reddit subs, especially now with the third party API ban killing the overwhelming amount of available mod tools… it’s a real tempest in a teacup over there.
Again, most lemmy mods are great, with only a few notable exceptions. Thankfully it’s astoundingly easy to block users and communites on the fediverse, and usually you can find the same community topic on another instance and not miss out on much. Love this place.
One of the worst things about Reddit is that you have some subs that are basically “too big to fail.” You have THE sub for a specific topic. Unless it’s really a niche topic with a small community to begin with, this is not a good thing.
If the sub has bad mods, you’re out of luck. Or you have a bad knock-off sub that gets like 1% of the traffic.
Wow, this is really how it happened?!? Unbelievable. Well done Spez, all your creativity shines every day…
Yep, and all gleaned from publicly available interviews.
Take it with a grain of salt, there are lots of pure falsehoods stated there. For example, Spez’s first stint in Reddit lasted two years longer than Swartz was involved (2007 for Swartz, 2009 for Spez).