Copy of the post in the event it is deleted or you don’t want to give ****it any traffic.

Hey again, /r/PICS!

We have another interesting development for you: /u/ModCodeofConduct still hasn’t responded to our request for a public reply… but they have seen fit to threaten us:

This is a final warning for inaccurately labeling your community NSFW which is a violation of the Mod Code of Conduct rule 2. Your subreddit has not historically been considered NSFW nor would they under our current policies.

Please immediately correct the NSFW labeling on your subreddit. Failure to do so will result in action being taken on your moderator team by the end of this week. This means moderators involved in this activity will be removed from this mod team. Moderators may also be subject to additional actions, e.g., losing the ability to join mod teams in the future.

Lastly, if you suddenly begin to post, or approve content that features sexually explicit content to your community in order to justify the NSFW label, we will immediately remove and permanently suspend moderators who have participated in this action.

Needless to say, we responded as you would expect:

Please read and publicly respond to our message addressing this.

We are not in violation of the cited rule as it is written. Moreover, according to Reddit’s listed policies, our subreddit is considered NSFW. If these policies are themselves in error, please correct their verbiage immediately. Otherwise, /r/PICS reverting to SFW would itself be in violation of those same policies.

Our team is currently discussing our actions in the meantime. Please permit us some time to reach a consensus.

Maddeningly, /u/ModCodeofConduct is telling us to go against Reddit’s listed guidelines, which puts us in something of a pickle: If we follow their commands, we’ll be in violation of the site-wide rules… but if adhere to said rules, they’ll remove us. /r/InterestingAsFuck is still unmoderated (at the time of this writing), so we can reasonably assume that our removal would effectively kill this community.

Well, we don’t want /r/PICS to die, so while we figure out how best to handle the situation (which includes waiting for a public, user-visible response from /u/ModCodeofConduct), we’re going to be exploring new ways of ensuring that innocent, unsuspecting users are not presented with offensive content. One possible avenue would see you – yes, you, the upstanding Redditor reading this – having the ability to tag any post that you personally found offensive.

If you have any other ideas, please share them in the comments!

Sorry for the confusion, /r/PICS! We’ll get back to you with more soon!

  •  Riptide502   ( @Riptide502@lemm.ee ) 
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    1 year ago

    I’m surprised the larger subreddits haven’t called their bluff. People keep talking like thousands are going to line up to moderate subreddits for free.

    Where do you source new moderators? Ask the community? Most redditors don’t want to be stuck on hall monitor duty and most of the power users that do enjoy it are the ones protesting. Of the ones you get, you’ll have to slowly check each one to ensure they’re on your side, and not a troll/protester that’s willing to trash the entire subreddit the moment you instate them.

    It’s not like their corporate connections will help with this either. They want profitability so they aren’t looking to payroll more people. How you drum up 20, unpaid volunteers to moderate a subreddit all day every day? How do you drum up 1000+ to cover a complete walkout.

    You can’t do that overnight. It would take time. Even if they give these to established powermods, the span of control will just be too large to manage. The big subreddits just need to call reddit on their bluff. They need to all resign simultaneously and force reddit into this bad position, where most of the platform goes unmoderated for weeks.

    • That’s what I’ve been saying. Let the admin remove some mods from a subreddit like r/pics with millions of users. I guarantee anyone the appoint will be very done with modding within a week. It’s rich that reddit is threatening to remove any porn posted to r/pics right now, since that will literally become the norm if moderators get removed.

      It’s like they expect mods to just appear out of thin air and act the same way as the current mods do

    • Yeah this has been the most obvious answer. The Reddit mods should walk, en masse. If spez wants to be like musk so bad then let him have it. Completely unregulated subreddits going to absolute shit. Advertisers pulling out. Just stop helping them run their own website and it will run right into the ground. Fuck ‘em, they killed all good will this go around and when called on it they’ve doubled and tripled down. I’ve got zero sympathy.

    •  Lvxferre   ( @lvxferre@lemmy.ml ) 
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      401 year ago

      It gets worse.

      One of the reasons why those Reddit powermods are in power is because they’re willing to moderate a subreddit for 8h, 12h, perhaps even 16h a day. They take it as a job; the replacements won’t, at most they’ll be willing to check the sub twice a day and that’s it.

      So to replace every single of those powermods you’ll need at least a half dozen new mods. Good luck finding them, Reddit! And if Reddit does find such huge amount of mods, you’ll get huge mod teams that will be fucking hell for the users and the mods themselves.

    • People will line up to do it for free, but not to the level Reddit would expect them to. When communities get too many problematic posts Reddit will scold the mods and expect them to do better. It’s foolish that they threaten to remove the mods.

  •  Lvxferre   ( @lvxferre@lemmy.ml ) 
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    1011 year ago

    I think that they will get banned, no matter what they do. However, the way that they’re setting this up, they’re showing everyone that Reddit rules are used toilet paper - it’s full of crap. They’re forcing the Reddit admins to give them ammunition to use against the admins themselves, I love it.

    • Yes. Reddit will do exactly that. They give exactly zero fucks about community cohesion, mod powers, spam bots, literally nothing matters except keeping the flow of generic doomscrolling content flowing so the ad revenue checks keep showing up.

      • Not the ad revenue checks. Reddit isn’t profitable even with ad revenue. The new reddit profit model is selling freely-contributed user-generated content to AI companies with a lot of money who want to train thei LLM’s on reddit content.

        This is about ChatGPT checks, not ad revenue checks.

        •  halvdan   ( @halvdan@beehaw.org ) 
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          1 year ago

          How about just making all comments complete non sequiturs. Correct sentences, but completely out of context, just to fuck with the AIs. If the comments aren’t all that valuable to teach AIs with anymore, well…

          Edit: Also upvoting those comments.

  •  db0   ( @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) 
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    331 year ago

    If they were just trolling the admins, it would be one thing, but they are so committed to not losing control of /r/pics, that they’re putting serious work into it. Cmon…

  •  BarqsHasBite   ( @someguy3@lemmy.ca ) 
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    1 year ago

    Oh no, threatening my unpaid labor so that you can get rich. What ever will I do?

    If the mods don’t leave now, they certainly will when Reddit IPOs and we hear how many tens of millions or hundreds of millions Huffman made off their unpaid work.

    • What boggles the mind in this whole thing is that moderation is the product. These fools are gambling with the only thing they can’t afford to lose.

      Here is Reddit inc’s dirty secret. The value they produces as a company is mod labor they don’t control and couldn’t afford to control if they wanted to.

      Attempting to gain revenue from AI bots ingesting the site’s content wasn’t the worst idea. Letting that turn into a fight with the moderators was crazy dumb. Nobody needed to know reddits dirty secret until after an ipo if it had been played right. That would have required a CEO who actually knew the secret though.