In this episode Rich and Paul discuss the unhealthy communities that form on big scale platforms. This necessitates the presence of moderators, leading to "Mod Drama". This podcast is sponsored by Aboard.

[Mic bleed] what?

Yeah.

Yeah.

R slash naruto.

Um, r slash physics closed.

That's a million members,

What about r slash power washing porn?

But something like 95% of Reddits are, are going private.

The moderators are taking them private subreddits.

Okay, so it's June 12th, 2023.

Sure.

Is

when, that's the time we're recording this.

This'll air probably within a few days.

Um, and what you're, well explain what the hell's going on.

I use Reddit.

I'm a lurker.

I don't post,

Yeah, me too.

I mean it's, you know, r slash headphones, r slash

yeah.

All the usual.

So, um, Reddit, for those who don't know, is an enormous site

full of pornography and conversation.

And it's been around for a long time, well over a decade.

Um, and it is, uh, you know, it's a giant bulletin board for the internet.

And like most bulletin boards, it's utter, utterly reliant on its

moderators to keep things under control on a per community basis.

basis.

Okay, so you've got.

Subreddits, what they call subreddits, which are topic-based.

Uh, and there are certain people who have specific rights to make sure

that things don't go off the rails.

Yeah.

Inappropriate content is posted.

People are mean to each other.

Whatever the

they can erase posts and, I mean, it's Reddit, so it's kind of

a high stakes game because the, you know, people post some rough stuff and

Right.

So the moderators wield a lot of.

There's rules that the moderators set.

set.

They set rules, they set rules per community, they collaborate.

Some of these communities have millions of members, some of them have tens

of thousands, like they're big.

You're representing, uh, you know, probably way more than, you know,

hundreds of millions of people are gonna come across Reddit.

Okay?

So, uh, Reddit changed its API rules, meaning that if you want

to have a client for Reddit that isn't the official Reddit client,

um, you have to start paying for access to their a p I.

Okay?

So Twitter's

done.

Like other people have done like it, it's not a shocking move.

It's an odd one this late in the game.

it's been many, many years.

And there are, that's the thing.

There are.

Client apps for Reddit that are immensely

They, they kind of define the experience for most

people who are heavy users.

that's right.

And so what happened is some of these apps had much better moderation

tooling than the the regular app.

Got it.

So one tap to get rid of something bad or whatever it may be.

here come the moderators and they go like,

whoa, you can't do this to us.

You're gonna kill us.

Well,

hold on.

So.

Reddit didn't shut down its api.

They just started charging money for

Correct.

And then what happened is they

prohibitive for these little apps

survive.

Well, and and they're not that little, right?

Like, but they're, they're like, well, look, that's it for me.

I'm not gonna spend 20 million a year on this thing.

I can't make that into a business.

Uh, and I have so many users, so I'm done.

I'm, I'm peace out.

And the mods went.

You can't go because I, I can't use the regular app.

It's exhausting.

So let me ask you this.

So wait, wait.

Let me just, I'll finish what happened, which is Then it's almost like I don't

wanna go into too much detail cuz this narrative plays out again over and over.

Incredibly unproductive, like, uh, interview with the

CEO town hall type meeting.

Very, yeah, very like, well, you know, uh, you know, kind of

not as this bad, but pretty bad.

Like, sort of like at Reddit we're convinced that everyone is an important

voice, you know, that, that kind of thing.

Uh, followed by a complete revolt.

And then they said, we're gonna just shut, take 'em all private.

Best of luck.

So you can flip a subreddit.

Ahmad can flip a switch.

Now obviously Reddit still has the master key so they could switch it

back on, but they can't make you moderate because they don't pay you.

So it

lead to chaos.

So you essentially, you have a group, a vast group of unpaid labor.

And, uh, kind of having, essentially a strike.

Yeah.

Um, until they can get better tooling and apps and e p things all worked out

look to, to fully get the full picture here.

I'm gonna be Reddit.

Okay?

Okay.

I want to, I want to go ipo.

It's been a long time.

wanna go ipo.

It's been a long time.

Um, uh, before I go into character as.

executive

at Reddit.

Um, just to make clear that I don't, I haven't thought about this and I don't

necessarily fall into these views.

Okay.

But you're gonna be Reddit.

I'm gonna be Reddit.

hi.

Hi.

How are you doing?

Avid gardening moderator.

Okay.

Nice to meet you.

Oh

Oh yeah.

No, I'm just out here gardening when I'm not moderating.

How are you?

I'm doing well.

Um, uh, I love how it's framed as unpaid labor.

It's a topic of passion for you.

You get to talk to your friends on it, and it's free.

Well, you know, I'll tell you, that was true for the first three

and a half hours, but now there's 360,000 members and there is an,

there is an argument about cucumbers that's been going on for 24 weeks.

I didn't recruit you and I can't fire you.

There are other gardeners.

What do you want from me?

I pay the a w s bill to even give you this service.

Okay?

Now if I'm true to form, I'm just gonna start sobbing.

and I will just start laughing.

there is.

Yeah, No, there is no, there.

There's very little productive dialogue that way.

Right?

Because what happens is the mods, I'm gonna say something that's not cool,

but I've seen it with many at large.

Uh, Site, your average mod is very motivated to mod and, uh,

MOD's gonna mod, MOD's

gonna mod and, and maybe other aspects of their life aren't, aren't

imbalanced, aren't, aren't imbalanced,

I'm enjoying this.

I thought I was the one who's gonna

this is a disaster, right?

Like I, I'm about, I'm, we're about

This is so good.

You're saying they're not getting enough sunlight is what you're

the truest cancellation is about to come for me right now.

Keep going, Paul.

Exactly.

So mods are gonna mod and mods.

Um, boy have I seen this play out a lot.

It's real serious business.

It is the ultimate internet drama, which is, I have given you my labor and

you will never acknowledge it enough.

Never.

And if you say, well, I'll pay you, I'll pay a dollar 50 a post.

They're like,

you know, like, you can never compensate me for what I've done.

That is a vibe.

Right.

And it is real.

And at the same time, these organizations really are utterly

dependent on humans showing up and cleaning up other humans mess.

Yeah.

So, you know, and then there's this bizarre dynamic, which

is new to the internet in some ways, where you have these like

quasi-governmental organizations.

Lots of volunteer labor.

The closest analog would be like a big church, like the Catholic church, right?

Like you, you, you know, nobody is a, you know, nobody like you might go

like clean up the church or dust the

Yeah,

Yeah.

And, and you do it because

you want everybody to have a really great experience.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, and

you're around a lot of people who have common interests

And then they said, actually, we need more money.

And so we're gonna, we're gonna shut down your access to the really good tools.

You'll have to work harder for no compensation, uh, to do

the thing that we need you to.

You in order to survive.

That's the mod point of view and the reta point of view is like,

why don't you buck up buttercup?

This is life and if you don't want to do it, maybe somebody else will do it.

Right?

I mean that's, that's what they're,

say that Can't say it.

Yeah.

I mean, but they're effectively saying that, right?

Like, a staring contest.

And

funny,

we've seen the same dynamic play

I saw Stack Overflow went through it, I think stack there.

The moderators are currently on moderator strike.

Again, like it's just a,

Here's what humans confuse.

Humans confuse control with ownership.

Especially on the internet.

Especially on the internet.

Yeah.

The internet.

Well, the internet, here's what I would say I do.

Look, we can, we can pursue that to its end, but I, I think people

get this, I do feel that the large platforms are really okay with people

getting that, being confused that way until it doesn't work out for them.

Well, sure.

I mean, look, let's get to their response, which was a boneheaded response.

That's, let's, let's treat that separately.

What happens is, if a, a platform reaches a certain skill, the people that, um,

wield power on it, and I mean, control and power are interchangeable here.

Effectively in their minds and in the minds of the communities that

they've cultivated, appropriate the platform, they view it as theirs.

It's not yours anymore.

You happen to be the one that actually pushes the API, calls out

and gives them the app, and you keep security working, but it's not yours.

It's theirs.

And,

Facebook, or you know what?

Reddit's at a funny scale though, because like the mods in the

communities are all kind of insular.

Whereas with Facebook, you do have these giant communities, but Facebook's

like, listen, this is your problem.

I made the box for you.

You can do whatever you want and if you screw up, we'll take it away.

But like, just don't make any trouble for me.

I'm not, you never getting a penny outta us.

Exactly.

Which, which by the way, gives you a sense of, of how well

Facebook threaded the needle.

Well, do you remember, we talked about this earlier, that the buy

nothing groups bootstrap on Facebook.

Yeah.

And then they're like, this isn't enough.

We need to create our own community.

And then the community absolutely imploded.

Yes.

Because once they left the absolutely indifferent, nightmare vision of the

web that Facebook likes to present, and we're like, we're gonna humanize this

and make it accessible, an eruption of human need and anger and frustration

followed not at Facebook at them.

Look, Facebook never had to deal with this because

there are no Facebook clients.

There's

No, that's right.

the corp experiences that Facebook produces and the

reason that was the case, and they,

most people think the internet is Facebook in the world, right?

Like that is

you never have to apologize for a thing you didn't do.

So Facebook doesn't have to explain to anyone.

Nobody is protesting Facebook for not having an open api.

Well, now actually between about 2021 to 2022, you actually

had to apologize all the time for

different, reasons, and then TWI Twitter had this moment, which

is if this is going to be a platform that allows for advertising placement

at scale, we have to control the whole

experience.

Otherwise, what's the point?

otherwise, what's the point?

And they, and there was heat

also because all the clients were like, we're not gonna let

any of those off lads in your feed.

Yeah, exactly.

And so Twitter shut it down little by little.

They pretty much made, and I think they worked out for a

couple of the more popular apps.

I think they gave them a little bit of a pass cuz they, they found them to be

not harmless, but they did shut it down.

It was early enough.

This is a perfect storm because moderators define power moderators.

Are getting yelled at at work, but they go home that night and they wield power.

They

run the kingdom.

And now Reddit.

And let's talk about how stupid Reddit turned out to be here.

Right.

My guess, and I don't know this for sure, my guess is if you sat down and looked at

probably the half dozen apps we're talking

about mm-hmm.

the material difference it made to not come to terms with

those apps is probably has nothing to do with their revenue story.

story.

Oh, they could have figured this out.

They could have

figured this was an, like so many of them.

This situation could have been avoided.

But

you remember before when I was imitating Reddit executive,

that's the, that's the fatal flaw, which is like, what's going on here?

I gave you a free thing.

You built a community on it.

You haven't paid me anything.

They sing it purely through their eyes.

Oh.

Well, what's tricky too is when a.

Community is a little toxic.

And I'm gonna, I'm gonna just go out on limb and say, sometimes

the MOD community in Reddit can be pretty difficult to work with.

Um, you do start to get a, as a, and this is a bad move as a leader, you get

that kind of like, you get punch drunk.

You're just like, all right, well, they're gonna hate me anyway.

Oh, whatever.

And I, that's, that is danger zone.

That's when you actually need to step back because yeah, okay.

They're gonna hate you no matter what you do, but you actually, you

can't make your decisions based on like, man, whatever the hell of them.

The hell of them.

Yeah, exactly.

And, and, and it's just not thoughtful.

It's not thought out.

Look what they're hoping, I'm guessing this by the way.

I'm guessing they're hoping, like, you know what, take it to Thursday, man.

Give it four days.

Nobody's gonna, nobody's gonna forget

Yeah.

And that may be the case, except for like a handful of subreddits.

Many people will just go, I mean, I'm still on Twitter

Yeah, no, I

literally spoon feeds me the dumbest ads I've ever seen

Listen, listen man, look, you can spend all of your

time trying to figure out which platform for, they're all bad.

Everything's bad,

everything's bad.

You know what you really want.

You wanna see cool like, um, uh, pilot tricks?

Yeah.

In the slash pilot slash flying.

Let's be clear.

If you decide to apply an ethical razor to where you're gonna consume

funny videos of cats, That's fine.

You can do that.

Absolutely.

And you will never be among the majority of humans.

They just, it just doesn't

scale

are consuming.

They don't care.

Right.

They don't care that there is a policy.

They don't know there arm mods.

They don't, they know that the, the cat make the cat jumped on the table.

That's,

that's literally, you know, most people just aren't

Honey, check this out.

Yeah.

Most people don't know where they are on the internet.

That's a fantasy of the internet that anyone cares.

Yeah.

Right.

And I say this as someone who builds web software, like people don't know.

They don't, if you, if you work for a magazine, they think

you work for another magazine.

If you work, if you build a website, they think it's another website.

Yeah.

They don't, no one knows.

one knows a hundred percent.

How would you, two questions for

like smart, powerful people.

They're like, they can't tell the difference between

their email and the web.

Yeah.

A hundred

People who have hundreds of billions of dollars of combined

spending power don't know what a URL is, and they're in their fifties.

close this

with

a two-part question for you.

All right.

What do you think is going, how do you think this

ends and how would you like, well answer the the second part first.

How would you like it to end and how do you think this ends?

I never want it to end.

enjoying.

it.

I

prefer the drama because Reddit is kind of a messy experience.

You always feel a little gross.

Yeah, so watching it implode is kind of fun.

Like I, I'm

I I'm hearing

Yeah.

Like I, I do want it to end because like, you know, otherwise if you go look for

a piece of stereo equipment, there's, it's very hard to get good resources.

It's a good resource.

Yeah.

You can search the search capability and re is

meaningful.

It's a lot of the internet, like a lot of what was

good about the internet ended up getting concentrated in a few places.

Reddit's one of them, as well as a lot of what's bad about

So you don't wanna see it fail?

I don't, I don't wanna see anything fail.

I, I mean, I, it's, it is a very, very val for all of its ups and downs.

It's an extraordinarily valuable

there are good places on

So I would like to see it.

What would I like to see happen?

I would like to see some sort of amicable resolution.

Amicable resolution here.

It feels like the right path is to make sure that.

Mods have access to the tools they need to do good work.

And, you know, maybe they need some ceremonial, like mod awards

or just like some, some, you know, sacrificial thing needs to happen.

Uh, what do I think will happen?

Probably that because you can't have a total revolt of your revenue source.

Right?

Like, you gotta gotta figure this out because yeah, you can go back in and

make everything unprivate again, but then people will just start spamming it.

Like, this is your human defense against all the other humans.

Yeah.

I mean, I, you just

so they have to work this

I mean, you could rebuild it, but it's an awful thing to have happen

if you'd like to go public or you're looking for an increased public profile.

Uh, the theme we're seeing, and we've seen it with Twitter play

out over the last nine months is, um, really great sound business guidance

powered by expensive consultants.

Rarely factor in how humans work.

now, especially on the internet.

I think we, we really have this fantasy that there's one kind of behavior in

business and it's consumer behavior,

They're either gonna buy it or not.

And, and, and what people don't understand who aren't really internet people is the

amount of value destruction that can be produced by one or two tiny missteps.

A hundred

Because it just, it's wildfire.

It's like, imagine if going to mc, every time somebody went to McDonald's, there

was a non-trivial chance that they would destroy the entirety of McDonald's.

Like the whole company.

Like

with one flipping, one switch in one McDonald's In Pennsylvania,

no, you know, it's like literally like one picture

of like a, you know, chicken McNugget with a horse head and

part hubris.

It's part really thinking you're exceptional at problem solving.

And boy, do these things get outta

I, well, and I, I think like if you are the leader of one of

these companies, you're so exhausted and you just basically see humans

in the abstract because there's no other way to see them at that scale.

And so then they do a thing and you're like, oh, well

they all, you know, oh well.

Okay.

Yeah.

Here we are.

So I, I think, um,

I do hope it survives.

I think it will survive and they'll work it

These, all these, they're they showed who's in charge?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's, it's not a matter of who's in charge.

I think what they showed was, um, that the sort of silent pact.

There's a contract that existed, which is like, yeah, Reddit, we see you're promoted

ads, but you gave us a playground.

Let's keep it chill.

You

talk about Milwaukee all day long.

Exactly.

And,

and, I am the, like I am the Reddit mayor of Milwaukee.

That's a cool thing to

it's a balance of power.

Yes.

That's not codified anywhere.

It just

It's funny, it wasn't money, right?

Like money always gets invoked like we are your unpaid labor.

But it was API access and tooling that just, that nuked this, it was,

you're gonna make, you're gonna add friction and everybody went, no you're

Yeah, Right,

Exactly.

that's, it's actually what this comes down to is a

labor movement around usability.

That's essentially it.

Isn't it wild

anyone.

They're not saying, we're lowering your wages.

there.

There's the future, man.

If you make your software less usable,

They may revolt on

you

that's when it happens.

yeah.

Um, this is entertaining.

I agree with you on that point.

Oh, they, there's a whole website where you get to watch all, and

I learned about all these Reddits that of course I can't visit right now, but,

You're like, I be interesting.

but, and it's us, you, you start to realize like,

wow, r slash mil is doing good.

Like it's one of the biggest media platforms in the world, right?

Just woo.

Oh Cats.

Um,

well, uh, best of luck to Reddit.

Best of luck to the Mods.

I know you guys.

Everybody's gonna work this out cuz you're all in a sick, twisted, nightmare family

Exactly.

You live.

Yeah, exactly.

There

Have fun at your infinite gathering of the Juggalos website.

Um, this podcast has been sponsored by another web

platform called aboard@aboard.com.

does, does a board need mods because it's about organizing links.

It has some Reddit vibes.

Well, a board by default is private.

Yes.

And you can flip a switch and make it public.

but no comments from the public,

but no comments.

And you can't see the internal comments

a board is for like a group of people who could fit around a table to

work together, maybe to comment on things, have a little conversation, get stuff

done, uh, save links, create data, and share it with the world if they so choose.

But it is not that kind of like rapid, infinite forum software.

That's not what we're building.

So, and it's, take

out@aboard.com.

I can be honest, I, I feel validated by some of our product

choices watching this meltdown.

I, I look, I think the trend around smaller, tighter circles rather

than mass broadcast is real beyond

well, you just, There's all these scaling problems.

The best, you know how it's like the best bug.

The best bug fix is the one where you don't introduce

the bug in the first place.

You just do.

Yeah.

And then the best solution to moderation is to create less

surface that requires moderation.

Exactly.

Exactly.

that's what we're building.

Anyway, check it out@board.com.

If you wouldn't like to hear more podcasts, you can,

uh, check out Z ford.com.

You can hit us on Twitter at z Ford.

You can send an email to hello@zford.com.

Let us, uh, reach out.

We'd love to get questions.

Have a lovely week