this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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In spez's interview with the Verge, he hyperfocused on the fact that locked communities whose "we're locking" posts were comment-disabled would have had a lot of dissent in the comments if the mods had been brave enough to leave them enabled. Completely ignoring, of course, the fact that the upvote ratios told a story of massively overwhelming support.
How does the literal CEO not realize that a comment section with a fair number of dissenters in a highly-upvoted post is just rabble-rousing and don't actually represent a majority? Like, in a scenario where you have 20k upvotes, 1k downvotes, and a comment section where a few hundred people are pissed off and arguing, spez is presenting that as a dissenting majority. What?
What are the odds he gets a rude awakening when he gives this power to the users and they vote in favor of keeping the mod teams in place? (That would imply some awareness of how his site works, though.)
I think what was even more infuriating was his insistence on validating even the smallest dissent against sub locking as justifying overruling the mods and community, while the entire mess was caused by his refusal to engage in good faith with dissent against his company's decision.
Dissent against mods he also disagrees with is sacred and needs protecting. Dissent against himself and Reddit Inc is meaningless noise that he both doesn't care about and is actively working to silence and prohibit.
He's been such a mess of lies and contradictions in all this. It'd be funny if it weren't such a sad death knell for a site I genuinely enjoyed.
My other favorite contradiction from that interview was when he claimed that Apollo had millions of subscribers, then claimed it wasn't worth subsidizing the insignificant 10% of the userbase that uses 3rd party apps. Which one is it, spez? Is a single app stealing millions of paying subscribers (which would be only a fraction of free users), or are apps not worth bending to because they're only 10% of your userbase? They can't both be true.
It really feels like he's speedrunning killing reddit. I'm not even mad, it's impressive 🍿
Everyone on reddit knows that if the mods are in the wrong, you start an alternative sub, and see if that takes off. This whole thing has been training users to start an alternative reddit.
I'm still trying to square "upvotes matter" with "brigading exists."
But then, it would appear that using Reddit for news and attempting substantive discussion put me in a much smaller minority than I realized.
If upvotes don't matter because brigading exists, wouldn't that hold true for a community vote to remove mods as well? They'd be just as open to brigading.
No matter how you slice it--and I'm honestly not sure which side of the argument you're sassing here, so looking at it both ways is valuable--spez is pretending votes are unimportant in one context but the key solution to solving the core issue minutes later. It's incredibly inconsistent; the man is having an entire meltdown.
Apologies for the lack of clarity. I'm not saying "in all cases, both must be considered."
What I meant is that given the latter, the former can't be used as a universal gold standard, and reducing it to that is disingenuous at best.