/u/spez is right about feudalism and that's why reddit as we know it is doomed
https://maya.land/monologues/2023/07/01/spez-feudalism-reddit.html(...)
So in this post, I want to talk a bit about how the relevant historical phenomena worked, a bit about why feudalism tends to be a pretty bad comparison to internet stuff, and a bit about why Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is – still! – maybe more correct than he knows when he compares moderators to landed gentry… in a way that suggests the end coming for Reddit as-we-know-it1.
(snip)
Local variance in custom makes it really hard to moderate from outside the community…
If you ask heavy-use Redditors about their use of the site, many will, unprompted, bring up that the main big subreddits are trash and, while they might also subscribe to /r/gifs or whatever, they’re really there for the niche communities that are quite different – in both tone and content. Yes, it’s impressive that the recommendation algorithms on short-form video platforms can deduce my susceptibility to thirst-trappy woodcutter lady content, but the level of specificity in which such content is arranged on Reddit is far more impressive (sometimes horrifying in its specificity, if we’re being honest). These are far more diverse in intent and effect than the “communities” of shared engagement that arise around algorithmically recommended topics.
Maintaining engagement on /r/AskHistorians requires a very different standard of post and comment moderation than e.g. /r/circlejerkaustralia; they are trying to be different things, people go to them for different things, and the rules that will best encourage posters to post and consumers to consume are different.
How would you do that in a scalable way from the outside? Hell, set aside trying to keep things on-topic – from the outside, how can you keep up with the ever-shifting dog whistles and coded signifiers of bigotry that accompany the first encroachments of Nazis into your bar? Maybe advertisers won’t understand either to care about the first wave, but you better believe they won’t like the media coverage of the later ones…
In an environment as heterogeneous and nichey as Reddit has been: you can’t. It works about as well as compiling the Local Fruit-Gathering Rules with the Firewood Addenda for every village in your nation. So if you’re going to have heterogeneous and nichey social media, you need moderation to be heterogeneous and nichey, enacted by the kind of person Scott calls a “local tracker”. Reddit as it has existed does not have the “state capacity” to do this any other way. Maybe, at least for the high-engagement subreddits that it considers most important, it can replace the local trackers with more compliant ones – but it can’t go without them. The king of Reddit, today, needs somebody to go be baron. If he couldn’t get them for free, he’d have to pay them.
…but if you can rent-tax from outside the community, you can shift the balance of power
Reddit does not pay its moderators. It is not fully accurate to say that Reddit even confers the status and control that moderators possess, because that status and control is scoped to their moderated communities, and thus principally a function of community prominence. Anyone can be a mod; being a moderator of something that matters is something different entirely, and it’s Reddit’s userbase that makes that happen. On Reddit, many communities are extremely fungible; use the site long enough and you’ll observe schisms and migrations to new bits of namespace. We can argue that there is some extent to which community prominence is driven by the desirability of the community name, which is a bit conferred by Reddit – if I’m looking for an X subreddit, I’m going to look for /r/X before /r/originalX, /r/seriousX, /r/XUncensored etc., so there’s something meaningful to who gets to keep running /r/X – but in practice this is moderately fluid, as genres of content merge and divide even without explicit mod drama.
So if I were going to pin down what Reddit “gives” its mods, I would probably put it something like this: The ability to create and grow an online community with a bunch of useful (and not free-to-operate!) infrastructure and with intercommunity discovery among a large existing userbase.
What Reddit gets from its mods is – following the above – the ability to make the money that it makes from ads.
So how do you know whether that’s a fair trade?
( i never saw this discussed like this before, pretty interesting)