if MODERATORS are landed gentry, what the fuck does that make rich bastards like him?
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Using gentry as a slam indicates he views himself as royalty. Gentry is defined as "people of good social position, specifically the class of people next below the nobility in position". FUCK SPEZ!!!
Another telling line was when he said businesses are beholden to a board. The prototypical example, and the one that makes more sense for mods, is a business being beholden to it's customers. As in, if you do things your customers don't like, they'll leave and go somewhere else.
Of course, spez doesn't believe users have a choice or any real power, otherwise he wouldn't act this way. To him, they're just a resource to be exploited for investors.
And there it is. They're going to implement a system that will enable them to remove mods without cause, justified by anonymous voting...when they have millions of bots that can vote however Reddit wants them to. People said they'd replace mods and instill puppets and this is quite literally that.
Won't solve thile moderation shit show it will cause but the removing the mods forcibly part is now in the works.
Honestly I don't know why any mods would stay after this, and I see more of them leaving. Reddit doesn't care about you mods. It's an abusive one way relationship that they need to walk away from.
I see it backfiring already.
"Hey we host a sub that's SFW about this popular actress we like. Rule 1, don't post pictures of her boobs"
Alright let me just go fire up the spambot hive and put down $3.50 for 500,000 votes to oust this mod
"Wtf guys, I just wanted to talk about her acting, couldn't you make a new sub for her boobs?"
Hey welcome everyone I'm your new mod and here's soandso's boobs"
I take it you’re a boob man.
If only people were to just LEAVE the site, even just temporarily until changes were made in their favor. A massive drop in user activity would be a huge hit to u/spez and at that point it wouldn't matter if his cronies took over the mods because no one would be on.
I find it funny that a lot of the people who were yelling for a blackout were still active during the 12th and 13th. This blackout was the wrong move man. Wrong move.
Anecdotally, everyone I personally know who uses reddit has dropped it.
There never were that many people yelling for a blackout or complaining in general. Fact simply is, that the average Reddit User doesn't care about it, since it doesn't affect them directly. If we throw in all mods, the 3rd party app users and all the people that care, we don't even reach 10% of Reddits userbase.
They had a drop of about 30% during the blackout which is already a lot more than expected, but that's mainly because subs are closed and people can't post.
They're not the last place we'll go. Neither is this. The core of free discussion on the internet moves with the times and it is moving here. All the way from Usenet to AOL to UBB boards to Myspace pages and Slashdot all the way to Reddit and now Lemmy, and so it goes.
Can we vote out u/spez?
If Reddit were a worker coop, that's how it would work. Maybe Lemmy should be a worker coop
Dude, fuck you read my mind, I was fucking gonna write that LMAO.
Even if he were right, that only a minority supports the protest, it'd still be the particular minority that runs your freaking site.
The audacity. The bullshit. The outright lies.
Spez is an embarrassment and I have no idea why the Reddit BoD hasn't asked for his resignation.
Aaron Swartz is turning in his grave right now. Despicable. Who knew his dream of a free and open place for expression and information wouldn't come from Reddit, but the Fediverse. I hope he would have taken some semblance of solace in what we've created.
Because he's already doing what they're telling him to do.
Last week I personally called the protest a “jr high school style walkout” in the post asking my sub if we should participate, and the response was overwhelmingly “yes, you idiot, shut it down”, and now here we are
So yea, fuck you spez
He's not completely wrong with the powermod=landed gentry analogy (and the implied spez=king analogy, for that matter). People have been (weakly) protesting and trying (not very successfully) to leave over the powermod situation for years, and it's true that the powermods aren't friends of ours.
But he seems to be suggesting that the protests are just the actions of the powermods, as if other users (and smaller mods) aren't also leaving. I think he's going to be disappointed when he discovers that the peasantry are also upset. They just don't have has his ear because he's so removed from them, so all he hears are the powermods.
The landed gentry were landlords, making money off of other people's domestic and business activities.
Spez is the landed gentry.
Oh yeah, this isn't going to backfire at all.
Ikr! Like there aren't already millions of bots infesting the site as it is ready to sway public opinion in the most optimal way for u/spez. There are so many Russian bots on reddit, they should call it a social nyet-work.
Even if he revolts against the mods, and replaces them with his cronies. Then what? Reddit is built off the backs of unpaid mods. The company simply doesn't have the resources to manage these subreddits or they would have a long time ago to prevent this sort of thing from ever happening. Because you gotta know that this API price change was a long time coming, with sites like Teddit, and Libreddit, and Stealth on F-Droid. Or my favorite TamperMonkey extension, Unedit Reddit. It had to be costing them money, because there were people like me who wouldn't step foot in that ad ridden cesspool without using a frontend alternative.
“If you’re a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. So a politician needs to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by its shareholders,” he said.
Cool, the first business owner voted out should be spez!
Also, a moderator is a volunteer - not a politician on six figures a year, or a mega business owner on seven. A volunteer is perfectly in their rights to pause volunteering when they feel their work is not appreciated.
Couldn't agree more man.
U/Spez on r/ChoosingBeggars?
lol this guy. What a tool.
That article was a wild ride. He said he wants to put the reddit changes to a vote. Just saying whatever I guess. If Reddit actually does that I'll eat a hat and a crow.
You just know that vote's going to be rigged. Trust nothing Spez says.
So it's treason, then.
Dig in, folks. Time to bring the pain.
We are all leaving my dude. Who will be there to vote?
Never trust internet to vote unless they want Reddit to be named Reddit-McRedditFace.
So reddit would rather pay hundreds, if not thousands of employees to moderate the site? Seems like a great business decision
This is the time when volunteer mods finally get their paycheck!
Step 1: Use alt account to trash talk your mod account. Step 2: Apply to oust your mod account with a small compensation Step 3: Profit!!!
How often to corporations have to make polls that backfire on them before they realize they're a bad idea?
Hey everyone, we're trying to keep the discussion cenetarlized at beehaw, please redirect to
Right on. Want me to delete this one?
As a former founder and moderator of a community that chose to host on Reddit, this is an even bigger red flag than the APIs.
Someone deciding where to put the effort in to build a community would now be crazy to do it on Reddit. This unambiguously takes it from being the founder's community that happens to be on Reddit, where they are investing their time to build their own community, to Reddit's community where the founding moderator works at Reddit's pleasure to serve Reddit for free. Reddit has already made other steps on that journey - but this would be the most overt wake up call that moderators are not free to shape their own community to a vision for how it will operate if they chose to host it on Reddit if it doesn't please the masses.
This is short-sighted, because people are going to found communities off Reddit instead. Tooling like Lemmy is only getting better, so Reddit is increasingly an unattractive choice.
It is also unnecessary - if people don't like the premise of a community, they can vote with their feet, and go to another one, and put in the effort to build the new community themselves. And applying the same principles to Reddit itself, if a majority of Reddit users say they don't want Spez to be CEO any more, or don't like the Board, should they be allowed to fire him, even if the shareholders don't want to do that? Or should they just vote with their feet and go to Lemmy? If he is anything but a hypocrite, he should let the users decide if he will continue as CEO.
Okay so, nuance, this should've been allowed way before this. Too many mods don't reflect the opinions of the communities they moderate. It should be somewhat of an elected position as opposed to the BDFL approach. (Benevolent dictator for life.)
landed gentry,
So, in this analogy Spez would be Vladimir Lenin consolidating his power by going after the kulaks?
welcome to Dune Spez, let's see who wins
spoiler
the battle between the Lansraad and the Emperor
HEY FUCKING IMBECILE /u/spez
If you want to promote vote out moderators who are still in the protest because YOU THINK this is a one sided strategy by them you should take a look at the protest threads and mega threads filled with upvotes, UNLIKE YOUR API ANNOUNCEMENT AND YOUR AMA FIASCO.
(I know he is not here, I posted that in some place in Reddit).
I'm one of the folks who walked out and I can assure him, I'm not a moderator 😅
Don't you think that $20 an hour is really undervalued. Maybe if the job was literally just banning spammers and trolls but it's more than that for most subs, especially the smaller ones.
Steve Huffman, the Reddit CEO, told NBC News in an interview that a user protest on the site this week is led by a minority of moderators and doesn’t have wide support.
What a moron. His ego just keeps getting in the way. It shows how much he's surrounded himself with "yes men" and how little his precious ego can take any form of criticism. Such a sad sad person.