Reddit has started removing moderator teams managing subreddits that switched the labeling on their communities to Not Safe For Work (NSFW) in the latest protests against the site. In addition to applying an age gate for desktop viewers and restricting access on mobile devices to logged-in users in the Reddit app, Reddit also doesn’t show ads on subreddits tagged NSFW. This cuts into its ability to monetize them, which is a major part of Reddit’s disputed push to charge apps for using the API.
CEO Steve Huffman told me in an interview last week, “90-plus percent of Reddit users are on our platform, contributing, and are monetized either through ads or Reddit Premium. Why would we subsidize this small group? Why would we effectively pay them to use Reddit but not everybody else who also contributes to Reddit?”
“Moderators incorrectly marking a community as NSFW is a violation of both our Content Policy and Moderator Code of Conduct,” Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt said to The Verge. He declined to comment when asked if Reddit removed the mods.
According to a post in r/ModCoord (moderator coordination), moderators of r/MildlyInteresting moved forward on Tuesday with changing the sub to NSFW after a user vote. In making that change, r/MildlyInteresting followed the steps of other subreddits that went NSFW recently, including r/interestingasfuck and r/TIHI (Thanks I Hate It).
However, according to the now-former r/MildlyInteresting mod that wrote the post, just after they switched the subreddit over, they were logged out of their account and locked out. It quickly became clear that Reddit-employed administrators (as opposed to the mods, who don’t work for Reddit) were involved:
Following this, another mod posted our update instead. Right after, the u/ModCodeofConduct [a Reddit admin account] account removed the post and flipped the sub back to restricted instead of public. Then, the second moderator was also logged out of their account and locked out. Other mods tried to re-approve the post, one of them was promptly logged out and locked out as well.
After that, according to the former r/MildlyInteresting mod, the entire mod team was removed from the subreddit. As I write this, r/MildlyInteresting, which has more than 22 million subscribers, says it is currently unmoderated. The mod says the entire team received a 7-day suspension.
If you are a current or former Reddit moderator or employee, I’m interested in hearing from you. Feel free to email me at jay.peters@theverge.com.
It’s apparently not just r/MildlyInteresting. Subs including r/interestingasfuck (11 million subscribers), r/TIHI (1.7 million subscribers), and r/ShittyLifeProTips (1.6 million subscribers), which had all gone NSFW or loosened their rules, are currently unmoderated.
Removal of mods is perhaps Reddit’s biggest action yet against its moderators, who are unpaid volunteers that sometimes dedicate years of their lives to managing these communities. Some mods said they felt threatened by messages sent by the company last week indicating it would unseat moderators who didn’t work to reopen their communities, and now that it’s a reality, the effects on those communities could be massive.
If it is possible to delete a subreddit? At this point it would send a better message than to do what they are currently doing.
most (if not all), big tech companies have backups behind backups of data, deleting a subreddit would just end up making them recover the data.
It’s not just that. You can’t delete a subreddit. It’s not in the code. Even when it was open source. It’s not in the code. It’s not physically possible for a sub to be deleted.
I wonder if there would be any value to go and start a bunch of new subs on reddit, with a very specific set of guidelines. Essentially an army of bots could populate these and it would serve as pure noise. A sort of DDOS if you will. I don’t think this could affect big subs, but it would drown out any smaller subs. Anyways, it’s just a thought.
deleted by creator
Usually are deletes not true deletes they are just set as deleted, often with a date or a boolean/bit in the database. I have never been to a company where true delete is the default. They are usually manually or scheduled. Just like non IT companies like banks store your info for many years. Even after you are not a customer because of the law.
So it is better to over write it. Often is that only backed up. Some have systems where nothing is truly overwritten because they need to see all changes like version handled web pages like Wikipedia but I would say most overwrite. It can be more complex than what is worth (to keep all the history).
In this case, I think some merry prankster should just scrape a sub in its entirety and reconstitute it on their own Lemmy instance as a shot across the bow.
…And then open source their code.
Ever thus to tyrants.
It isn’t possible. I tried deleting my very small sub that I’d been moderating for a decade. All I could do was abandon it in place and revoke my own modship.