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.
I’m one of the mods mentioned in the article (Dan) and yes, I’m here. Been talking (well emailing) with Scharon for a number of weeks now. I’m highly unlikely though to become a mod again here or anywhere. I just don’t think I can handle it again to be honest. I’ll continue to contribute where I can with advice but my mod days are likely past.
EDIT: For those that didn’t read the full article, I was a mod of /r/homeautomation which is discussed further down. I was not, nor was ever, associated with /r/canning. Just wanted to make that bit clear. :)
Just wanted to chime in as another mod mentioned in the article who has been communicating back and forth with Ms. Harding over the last few weeks. I’m also burnt out on the idea of being a mod again. It’s just not worth it, especially when I have so many other things to occupy my time with.
As someone with no interest in canning whatsoever, I just want to thank you and your fellow mod below for contributing your niche expertise and no doubt enormous amounts of time and passion to the internet.
People call modding a thankless task, and at times like this it must surely feel that way, but countless people will have silently thanked you as they benefitted from your expertise and willingness to share it freely. You represent what humanity and science and education should really be about, for that I deeply appreciate your efforts.
I was a mod on /r/homeautomation, probably should have clarified that (though it’s in the article). I was a mod there for some 7 years and dedicated many hours to helping people get into the hobby. It was a huge passion of mine after I bought my first house.
But you are right, it was 100% a thankless role. The trolls at times can be especially…tiring but I loved the community and it was all worth it. I can only hope I set at least a few people on a path of a new passion.
I truly, truly appreciate your kind words though. It means a lot as thanks are few and far between while modding. Mostly we just got yelled at for “censorship” when someone was banned for being an ass or totally off-topic.
Thank you so much for your service. I was a mod of a tiny gaming sub and so got only the barely taste of what you must have experienced daily. In my case we argued endlessly (& unfortunately sometimes toxically) which game mechanics are “better” to take advantage of,
while you are over there dealing with literally potential life-and-death situations!(edit: oh, well it at least is true for some mods, even if not you, but I still thank you for all your efforts nonetheless!:-P) (I hoped that during a pandemic I was at least helping people deal emotionally with being indoors all the time, plus just in general trying to encourage good behavior within society, but it is nowhere near the same I am sure:-P) I can only imagine the stress you had to go through here during the fall of Reddit, but I do not have to imagine that feeling of burn-out: most mods actually who really truly care about their communities only last a handful of years if that (I think I read somewhere that the average was like 1-2 years).You deserve peace, and maybe you’ll find some other way to contribute to your community - in fact you definitely will, though it may not be on the internet next time:-). Also, I noticed that a lot of the stressful situations I encountered were due to Reddit changing its nature YEARS before Huffman did this recent fiasco - it encouraged people to speak rather than listen, e.g. to perhaps ask for recipes rather than do a search for pre-existing ones. An additional post = an additional metric to count and potentially an additional advertisement to display, while a search showing “canned” results (hehehe pun intended:-P) did not gather them as much profit, but then the former added to your workload whereas the latter would not, so a great deal of the problems that mods faced were issues of Reddit’s own devising, I think. At least in quantity if not in quality.
But also in quality too b/c it changed the very focus away from finding facts and towards encouraging the lonely to speak with others, in a manner in which “facts” can take a backseat to that human connection… which can get some people killed in the process.:-(
So I definitely understand why you would want to distance yourself from all of that. Me too. The need will be met in some other way - maybe via books, magazines, or websites with only vetted authors allowed, or perhaps with disclaimers added to every submission, and maybe a paid curation staff, or even AI tools scanning for common misinformation specific to that genre, I don’t know. But in any case, I did want to thank you for your own efforts. I have no interest in any of those communities so never once went to any of those, but I do like to see people volunteering their time to help other human beings:-).
I saw your edit, and we did still deal with life and death (in terms of electrical work) but probably not on the order of magnitude as /r/canning. I’m about to head to bed but at least wanted to say thank you for the kind words. I’ll find peace, but it won’t be in modding. Hell, I’ve applied to be an engineer for lemmy.world! I like working with tech better than people anyway, lol. I’ve been catching up on a backlog of games, my own home automation oddly enough, home projects that have been on hold since covid started, etc. Hope you had a fantastic holiday weekend (assuming you are in the US)!
Then I must say thank you once again for your service!!! :-D This time looking forward rather than backwards, as the need now (for Lemmy and even more so Kbin) is more technical than social, so it makes absolutely perfect sense to pivot, to use a different approach to meet that different need.
I would wish for you that you feel no guilt at all over what you were forced to leave behind: the way I see it (upon reflection, now I mean, not that I foresaw it or anything:-D), Reddit was always bound to fall, b/c it was always beholden to corporate interests, which means it was always going to be sold off in an IPO, which was thus always going to end up in the hands of some kind of Musk or Eisner or Bezos or some such, eventually - that is just a given, these days, unfortunately it seems:-(.
So it was fun while it lasted, but now it is time to build something more permanent and stable, to last for the future. I cannot do that myself right now, but you can and you will be, and that fills me with pride that more kind-hearted people are stepping up to answer that call!:-D The funny part is that moderation is needed far less here than it ever was on Reddit, so I hope you know what I mean when I say that “Reddit has died; long may Reddit yet live” (b/c that gives a place for the trolls to go, hopefully bothering us less over here!:-P although that state will not last forever ofc… yet Lemmy and hopefully eventually Kbin will be better able to handle it, as you and others continue to take it forward)
Really appreciate it. I don’t feel any guilt, maybe a little sadness as I really enjoyed the community and spent a lot of time on it.
I am excited for the new opportunities here and the fediverse at large and hope to be able to contribute even in a small part to the continued growth.
That is the saddest part of all for me: mods pour in their hearts to build up a place, and in return? Well, you said it:
The love is not returned, nor was it ever going to be - nor was that the point of offering in any case, really. So now it is time to turn to planting different seeds that are more likely to yield better results. :-) So long as Huffman was ultimately in control, that was never going to be fully possible over there, b/c you’d be constantly fighting that system. The same one that kept doing things to hide the sidebar, hide the “Rules” for each community, encourage posting to an extreme degree and yet discourage searching by making it difficult to perform and the results pathetic afterwards anyway: you can’t turn away the tide when it has the full force of the entire ocean behind it.
Over here, things are not as refined atm as within the walled garden, but we like it better that way:-P. Here, we are truly free:-).
I was the sole mod of /r/skin until I got warned about the subreddit being private in protest.
I originally took it over because it was 100% spam and scams and the previous mod hadn’t been on Reddit for years. It took a year before the spammers gave up. When I left I turned off the automod and the spammers will return. So much for trying to build a helpful space.
Thanks for contributing to the article by agreeing to be interviewed for it. How did they track you down, if you don’t mind me asking?
She reached out to me on reddit. It was dumb luck I had landed there from a Google search (and was still logged in) as I don’t spend any time there anymore.
Interesting. Thanks for sharing your story! I’m sorry it had such a shitty ending.