Concerns of Redditor safety, jeopardized research amid new mods and API rules.

Concerns of Redditor safety, jeopardized research amid new mods and API rules.

Did you know that improper food canning can lead to death? Botulism—the result of bacteria growing inside improperly treated canned goods—is rare, but people can die from it. In any case, they’ll certainly get very ill.

The dangers of food canning were explained to me clearly, succinctly, and with cited sources by Brad Barclay and someone going by Dromio05 on Reddit (who asked to withhold their real name for privacy reasons). Both were recently moderators on the r/canning subreddit and hold science-related master’s degrees.

Yet Reddit removed both moderators from their positions this summer because Reddit said they violated its Moderator Code of Conduct. Mods had refused to end r/canning’s protest against Reddit and its new API fees; the protest had made the entire subreddit “read only.” Now, the ousted mods fear that r/canning could become subject to unsafe advice that goes unnoticed by new moderators. “My biggest fear with all this is that someone will follow an unsafe recipe posted on the sub and get badly sick or killed by it,” Dromio05 told me.

Reddit’s infamous API changes have ushered in a new era for the site, and there are still questions about what this next chapter will look like. Ars Technica spoke with several former mods that Reddit booted—and one who was recently appointed by Reddit—about concerns that relying on replacement mods with limited subject matter expertise could result in the spread of dangerous misinformation.

  • Ilovethebomb@lemmy.ml
    245·
    1 year ago

    I mean, what were they expecting to happen? Reddit made it very clear they would remove moderators who kept subreddits closed.

    • Yaztromo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      56·
      1 year ago

      Hey — one of the mods mentioned in the article here.

      The idea was that if enough subreddits banded together and shut down, we could have brought Reddit to the negotiating table and helped to save the 3rd party apps so many of us relied upon for our daily Reddit experience.

      Unfortunately, it seems that way too many mods preferred the sense of control they had over their communities rather than what was right or just. All those subs that went public again after 48 hours, and all the other ones that went public again but with protest content killed all momentum the protest had, and doomed it.

      The part all too many people miss is that Reddit is like an iceberg on the ocean — while frequent visitors see the new content at the top, it’s the huge mass of old content that brings Reddit the bulk of its revenue. It’s all that old content that is indexed by Google and which shows up towards the top of Google search results — and during the shutdown, all of those links were broken. Google even took note during the protest that a significant number of search results were leading to broken links.

      This look was terrible for Reddit, and hit them directly in the pocketbook. But then some mods decided they didn’t mind being bent over a barrel by Reddit so long as they could put “moderator” on their resume and reopened too soon. The subs that went with John Oliver content were droll, but also reopened the huge mass of content that lies beneath the waves and which Google indexes into. Reddit didn’t lose anything from those subs.

      I was fully expecting to be turfed. I pretty openly dared Reddit to do it. After the shit they pulled I wasn’t going to go back and do free work for them on their terms. I forced them to be the bad guy. We had to show people how Reddit was treating its volunteer moderators, and in the end they didn’t disappoint.

      In the end, for me, I chalk this one up as a win.

      • Ilovethebomb@lemmy.ml
        3·
        1 year ago

        Fair enough. Although, I remember seeing stats on how much their traffic was down in those 48 hours, and it wasn’t much, I don’t think they even broke 10%.

        At this point, the only way to truly hurt Reddit is to move the community to another platform.

    • sylver_dragon@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15·
      1 year ago

      They were hoping Reddit would blink first. Unfortunately, it’s easy to find people who don’t know or don’t care about the changes. So, Reddit cans any mods who don’t play ball. Maybe it will have a long term effect, maybe not.

  • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    151·
    1 year ago

    Sure, but users dying don’t impact Reddit’s valuation in a direct fashion, or the payout /u/spez is gonna get, so long as they can sandbag any potential legal issues long enough that they become the new owner’s problem. And money’s all they care about.

  • Destraight@lemm.ee
    152·
    1 year ago

    I block a Reddit like community, because I don’t care about Reddit. Now I’m seeing the same news article here. Don’t you guys have anything better to post than reddit?

  • cabron_offsets@lemmy.world
    134·
    1 year ago

    I still browse Reddit whenever I feel like I hate myself and need to repent by subjecting myself to endless OF thirst traps, bots, anime porn, and fucking lame-ass, trite-ass jokes. Which is to say, fuck Reddit, I haven’t been there since they killed Apollo. Oh, and I have it on good authority that spez fellates his mom on the regular.

  • FriendBesto@lemmy.ml
    1·
    1 year ago

    I can proudly state that I have not logged on to Reddit since their API shenanigans. I am better off due to that.

    If I need any info from the site, I just use RSS. Plus the censorship on reddit that created crazy echo chambers in many subs was suffocating.

  • Willer@lemmy.world
    17·
    1 year ago

    “My biggest fear with all this is that someone will follow an unsafe recipe posted on the sub and get badly sick or killed by it take the internet seriously and hurt themselves in the process,” I think that is beyond your power.