Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
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Realistically, I don't think this will go anywhere. While Reddit's use of free moderators to do the bulk of the work might raise eyebrows, they've been very clear about the fact that moderation is a volunteer effort, rewarded with "status" as a moderator and greater control of the communities moderated.
However...
Going forward, Reddit moderators should absolutely collectively bargain for pay, refusing to moderate unless Reddit pays them fairly for their efforts. I think I saw somewhere that the average moderator spends around 20 hours a week moderating (could be remembering wrong) so asking for equitable pay would be a way to deprive Reddit of millions of dollars of unpaid labor. Worst that happens there for the fediverse is that they agree, though.
What will really happen: new mods will be put in their place instead, willing to do the dirty work for free because they don't get the protest. They will probably be worse than the people they replaced and they will not defend their communities against the further changes the website will bring. This will kill Reddit as we know it, but it won't happen overnight, it will take months or even years, every community slowly draining away its goodwill while users organize new communities elsewhere, be it Lemmy or wherever else. At that point, Reddit will become a news aggregator or a boring social media websites closer to tiktok than it is to the discussion centered place it is now. And we won't be there to really see it under that new guise, just like I had to check to see that digg.com has now become a sad flipboard clone.
And that's a perfectly acceptable outcome! If Reddit dies like Digg, Tumblr, and now Twitter have done, then I'm okay with that and I imagine that most of us here are too. If Reddit's new mods are low quality, then illegal content will become more prevalent and they'll risk, at the very least, public censure for their enabling of [insert illegal stuff here.] But you're right... Reddit is not likely to die overnight. It'll take time measured in years.
They don't have the labour available to just replace every single moderator. Some subs take teams of dozens just to somewhat function.