Concerns of Redditor safety, jeopardized research amid new mods and API rules.
Did you know that improper food canning can lead to death? Botulism—the result of bacteria growing inside improperly treated canned goods—is rare, but people can die from it. In any case, they’ll certainly get very ill.
The dangers of food canning were explained to me clearly, succinctly, and with cited sources by Brad Barclay and someone going by Dromio05 on Reddit (who asked to withhold their real name for privacy reasons). Both were recently moderators on the r/canning subreddit and hold science-related master’s degrees.
Yet Reddit removed both moderators from their positions this summer because Reddit said they violated its Moderator Code of Conduct. Mods had refused to end r/canning’s protest against Reddit and its new API fees; the protest had made the entire subreddit “read only.” Now, the ousted mods fear that r/canning could become subject to unsafe advice that goes unnoticed by new moderators. “My biggest fear with all this is that someone will follow an unsafe recipe posted on the sub and get badly sick or killed by it,” Dromio05 told me.
Reddit’s infamous API changes have ushered in a new era for the site, and there are still questions about what this next chapter will look like. Ars Technica spoke with several former mods that Reddit booted—and one who was recently appointed by Reddit—about concerns that relying on replacement mods with limited subject matter expertise could result in the spread of dangerous misinformation.
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I’d just like to say fuck Reddit.
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Reddit sucks.
Consider ritualistic suicide of your old account
https://old.reddit.com/r/redditseppuku/top/?sort=top&t=all
I’m doing this. It  it sucks because there’s a wealth of knowledge there, but I’d rather get it someplace else and I feel guilty every time I go there,  and I was a digg refugee when they fuck their old site so I’ve been through this before… Forces change so at least there’s that.
And /u/spez. Don’t forget that shit head.
I block a Reddit like community, because I don’t care about Reddit. Now I’m seeing the same news article here. Don’t you guys have anything better to post than reddit?
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A content filter for the word “reddit” might be worthwhile for you. It’s a feature I use in sync, but I’m sure other apps also support it.
They caused these problems themselves… let em rot in it.
Sure, but users dying don’t impact Reddit’s valuation in a direct fashion, or the payout /u/spez is gonna get, so long as they can sandbag any potential legal issues long enough that they become the new owner’s problem. And money’s all they care about.
money
=> short-term profits, ftfy
When asked for comment, Reddit’s director of corporate, policy, and safety communications, Gina Antonini, said via email:
Sounds like none of my problem, tho it sure would suck to be you, bi!ches! (essentially)
“Reddit” is dead. It remains to be seen what, if anything, will replace it. e.g. where did those exact mods go, who were mentioned in the article? A Fediverse location, if they can stand all the bugs here? Or nowhere, if they were too shaken to want to devote their time to some other place? Or will they go back even, seeing >95% of their communities refusing to leave Reddit (until it literally kills them of botulism ofc)? Only time will tell…
I mean, what were they expecting to happen? Reddit made it very clear they would remove moderators who kept subreddits closed.
The NFL reddit sucks now. My less geeky friends who don’t give shit about lemmy have commented on it.
I can proudly state that I have not logged on to Reddit since their API shenanigans. I am better off due to that.
If I need any info from the site, I just use RSS. Plus the censorship on reddit that created crazy echo chambers in many subs was suffocating.
I mean, Reddit deserves to be punished, and there are many reasons to be upset (I personally shredded all my contributions and deleted my account in protest), but I kinda feel like the canning safety issue might be overblown. Nothing is stopping them from staying and calling out unsafe recipes with comments/in association with the new moderators. Sure, they have to go through the new mods to fully remove things, and their removal in the first place raises significant ethical questions, but calling this a safety issue because “someone else could get it wrong” seems like they’re reaching.
It is not. The mere fact that someone is likely to get some info wrong is not a fact that is in question, only the likelihood of its occurrence is, and quite frankly neither you nor I are qualified to know how often such posts were submitted and rejected, but I have a hunch that the former mods of those exact subs just might?
It reminds me of the story where a guy was fired b/c he refused to lie and state that the train wheels were okay when in fact they were overheating (this was in the USA but probably similar stories happen in most countries, so really is much more broadly applicable). This was back in February of this year iirc. Now we know that many people have died as a result of derailments since then - and potentially worse yet, some will suffer illnesses for an entire lifetime and extremely possibly (even likely, even certain if I am not mistaken) for another generation or few from now, as a result of the carcinogens released into those areas.
Again, for emphasis: NOW we know that, but even back THEN, it still would have been a true fact that “train derailments are more likely than they were in the past, b/c of the reduction in safety controls”. We did not need to wait for people to die to be able to believe that, it was always true, and imagine a wonderful world where nobody at all had to die, b/c having seen the reduction in safety controls, someone acted and placed new controls in place that prevented it.
The fact here is that info obtained from Reddit is less “safe” than it used to be. Hopefully nobody has to die to prove that conclusively. Ofc all info on the internet should be subjected to scrutiny, but not everyone is so cautious, and moreover, “transitions” especially can be harsh, i.e. from a resource (e.g. a particular sub) that had developed an EARNED reputation for providing only safe info, to now where the sub has the same name, but has a totally different internal structure, with fewer to no safety controls inside.
That is my two cents anyway, fwiw.
“My biggest fear with all this is that someone will
follow an unsafe recipe posted on the sub and get badly sick or killed by ittake the internet seriously and hurt themselves in the process,” I think that is beyond your power.You never look up tutorials?
