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’d just like to say fuck Reddit.
Reddit sucks.
Consider ritualistic suicide of your old account
https://old.reddit.com/r/redditseppuku/top/?sort=top&t=all
I’m doing this. It  it sucks because there’s a wealth of knowledge there, but I’d rather get it someplace else and I feel guilty every time I go there,  and I was a digg refugee when they fuck their old site so I’ve been through this before… Forces change so at least there’s that.
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And /u/spez. Don’t forget that shit head.
I mean, what were they expecting to happen? Reddit made it very clear they would remove moderators who kept subreddits closed.
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.
Good for you! I was mod of a tiny gaming sub, and 99% of its members did not care the least tiny bit about Reddit. They will when it comes for old-Reddit, but the “first they came for…” argument did not manage to penetrate their shells, especially as they were involved in multiple subs and those all stayed behind intact as well. So like 4 of us started a new community here… where we have maybe 1 post a week instead of 1 per hour. Even that much is inordinately complicated by all the bugs on Kbin/Lemmy, where ~80% of the time when you want to upvote or boost it asks you to re-login (actually it’s ~100% after a certain threshold of time is reached, or 0% if you instantly do it without taking time to read or write anything first, but that is not normal behavior!), and my notifications have been permanently busted for weeks now due to a bug where if you comment on a post that a mod later removes, the notification of someone responding to you has no way to ever be removed or even seen, ever again. So what I am saying is… I really cannot even so much recommend that they come here, just yet? I am a techie person and can patiently deal with these things, but most of them are not, and won’t.
But you cannot control them. You can only control yourself. Which you did? Thus, good for you! YOU at least did the right thing. Maybe others will follow your lead, especially as the software gets better (Kbin in particular is more in its infancy than Lemmy - like iirc it even has zero moderation tools right now!?), or maybe they will not, but that again is on them. You at least showed them the way.
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.
Traffic stats actually went UP during those 2 days and in the next month or two after that time! Much of that was likely from the bots used to shred all the data whilst removing it, but they still counted as “traffic”.
As you say, the only way forward would be to move. But to where? 99% of people in my small gaming sub refused to come here, and with all the bugs now (I’m on Kbin, there seem many more here than on Lemmy tho), I can hardly blame them: this place is not ready for them.
Anyway, the point was not to hurt Reddit, the point was to be okay. In part by getting Huffman to either back down, or getting the board members behind him to ask him to step down or forcibly remove him, neither of which happened, so now… we move, b/c that is all that is left to us to do. Even if 99% of the community remains behind. :-(
The best way to make people move, in my view, is for the content creators to move. The consumers will follow.
Absolutely. I am not really one of those, although I tried to do my part, and yet there needs to be a minimum amount to really be self-sustaining.
Also, the software is REALLY buggy. I am on Kbin, and 100% of the time when you want to upvote or boost some comment or thread, it asks you to re-login if you do that after spending a minute reading and/or typing - i.e. it only remembers who you are for a few seconds. Also my Notifications have been busted for WEEKS now, b/c anytime you comment on a post that is later removed by a mod from elsewhere on the Federiverse, the notification will be poisoned and can literally never go away, nor even be visited, nor can you visit any other notifications (update that I just found out yesterday: that are on the same page), so basically you will forever receive continually-new notifications that you cannot visit, i.e. it is the entire Notifications system that becomes unusable, not just that single one. Oh yeah, and afaik, moderation tools are literally non-existent on Kbin.
Lemmy is much more advanced, even having several mobile apps (which iirc Kbin has none yet nor will it ever in the future until it opens up its API publicly) but either way I can really empathize why people, especially non-technically minded ones, would (even should?) STRONGLY hesitate to come here. Like for one thing, I already would like to move my account from Kbin to Lemmy, but account migration isn’t a thing. I am not going to go around and ask every person that DMs me to now shift over to use a new account, after having just done that for Reddit. And then do it again, if I don’t like the new instance? And again, and again, and again, and again?
Fuck spez yes but… now what? This place isn’t ready for the masses just yet. Especially Kbin. Though people are starting to work on it, and that will change, soon(-ish).
Right now, Lemmy/Kbin is good to replace doom-scrolling with meme-scrolling. And for communities where enough people were willing to migrate, it may even be a full replacement for a niche sub-Reddit, but I understand why 99% of people are remaining behind. Can we really blame them? I mean yes, obviously, but also, can we, really? It is ultimately their choice what to do with their lives.
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.
So, Reddit cans any mods who don’t play ball.
Well I certainly hope they do so safely, or they could end up with botulism.
The only safe way to can mods is by using a pressure cooker which will allow the jars to reach a high enough temperature for safe canning. Do not attempt to water bath can a mod.
I preserve all my mods via dehydration and vacuum sealing. I never can them. That was their first mistake. They should have just put up AI bots trained on previous mod data.
(I really hope they don’t see this and think it’s a real suggestion.)
Not bad.
They caused these problems themselves… let em rot in it.
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.
We will continue to be profit driven until profits arrive.
u/spez
money
=> short-term profits, ftfy
When asked for comment, Reddit’s director of corporate, policy, and safety communications, Gina Antonini, said via email:
Sounds like none of my problem, tho it sure would suck to be you, bi!ches! (essentially)
“Reddit” is dead. It remains to be seen what, if anything, will replace it. e.g. where did those exact mods go, who were mentioned in the article? A Fediverse location, if they can stand all the bugs here? Or nowhere, if they were too shaken to want to devote their time to some other place? Or will they go back even, seeing >95% of their communities refusing to leave Reddit (until it literally kills them of botulism ofc)? Only time will tell…
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:
Mostly we just got yelled at for “censorship” when someone was banned for being an ass or totally off-topic.
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.
it’s possible that nothing replaces it, as that area of the internet is just gone
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.
Plenty of anime porn on Lemmy. You can at least get that here.
Burggit.moe is where a lot of the anime porn subs left for
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?
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A content filter for the word “reddit” might be worthwhile for you. It’s a feature I use in sync, but I’m sure other apps also support it.
“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.
But u/spez’s cash and prizes are more important than this.
They don’t care about the collateral damage, whether it’s Elon Musk or Trump or the lemur boy.
The NFL reddit sucks now. My less geeky friends who don’t give shit about lemmy have commented on it.
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.
“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 ittake the internet seriously and hurt themselves in the process,” I think that is beyond your power.You never look up tutorials?
I mean, Reddit deserves to be punished, and there are many reasons to be upset (I personally shredded all my contributions and deleted my account in protest), but I kinda feel like the canning safety issue might be overblown. Nothing is stopping them from staying and calling out unsafe recipes with comments/in association with the new moderators. Sure, they have to go through the new mods to fully remove things, and their removal in the first place raises significant ethical questions, but calling this a safety issue because “someone else could get it wrong” seems like they’re reaching.
Hey — one of the former mods of r/Canning here.
I don’t want to see people get sick, and I don’t want to see people die from what usually amounts to less than $5 worth of home canned food.
But that doesn’t mean I’m now bound for eternity to Reddit to help ensure they don’t hurt anybody. That only helps Reddit. After what they put us through I’ve stopped any and all contributions to their ungrateful website.
Nor does it mean I have to stop criticizing Reddit for choosing questionable mods to replace us.
Thanks for taking the time to respond, even though I was critical! Sure, I have no disagreement with anything you said in your reply. I’m also involved in hobbies where bad information can hurt people (including canning and foraging for mushrooms), and I’m obviously against knowledgeable people being removed from positions of authority in these communities. This post bolds the text about being worried that new mods may miss something that the old mods wouldn’t, which could lead to someone getting hurt. I saw that, and that a couple of early comments latched onto it as a focus. I had broccoli in a wok that I needed to get back to and just fired off a quick comment as a bit of infernal advocacy that the replacement of mod powers probably isn’t as dire as the quote makes it sound.
It is not. The mere fact that someone is likely to get some info wrong is not a fact that is in question, only the likelihood of its occurrence is, and quite frankly neither you nor I are qualified to know how often such posts were submitted and rejected, but I have a hunch that the former mods of those exact subs just might?
It reminds me of the story where a guy was fired b/c he refused to lie and state that the train wheels were okay when in fact they were overheating (this was in the USA but probably similar stories happen in most countries, so really is much more broadly applicable). This was back in February of this year iirc. Now we know that many people have died as a result of derailments since then - and potentially worse yet, some will suffer illnesses for an entire lifetime and extremely possibly (even likely, even certain if I am not mistaken) for another generation or few from now, as a result of the carcinogens released into those areas.
Again, for emphasis: NOW we know that, but even back THEN, it still would have been a true fact that “train derailments are more likely than they were in the past, b/c of the reduction in safety controls”. We did not need to wait for people to die to be able to believe that, it was always true, and imagine a wonderful world where nobody at all had to die, b/c having seen the reduction in safety controls, someone acted and placed new controls in place that prevented it.
The fact here is that info obtained from Reddit is less “safe” than it used to be. Hopefully nobody has to die to prove that conclusively. Ofc all info on the internet should be subjected to scrutiny, but not everyone is so cautious, and moreover, “transitions” especially can be harsh, i.e. from a resource (e.g. a particular sub) that had developed an EARNED reputation for providing only safe info, to now where the sub has the same name, but has a totally different internal structure, with fewer to no safety controls inside.
That is my two cents anyway, fwiw.
Mod of /r/homeautomation here (mentioned in the article as “Dan”) and yeah, you pretty much nailed it. In our case the biggest concern was amateurs working with electricity. The “which wire is which” posts were often greeted with a “black hot, white neutral” response which on the surface is generally correct. However, there are lots of cases (especially in houses older than say 20 years) where that can be wrong and dangerous. It’s further complicated by the fact that multiple live circuits can exist in the same box so even if you killed power to the light you are working on the box may still have live wires.
As with canning, homeowners dying from electrocution is rare, but it doesn’t negate the danger. I’ll wire shit hot all the time (much to my wife’s annoyance) but I’ve been doing this for years and with lots of guidance and supervision. I will also very much KNOW what’s hot and what’s not both through a no-contact probe and a voltmeter. Electricity isn’t something people should be messing around with if they don’t have at least a basic understanding.
I’ve rambled long enough, lol. Funny enough, I also live in the state where the train derailment happened in February (though I was nowhere near it).
The problem, as I understand it, is that a company has no legal responsibility to NOT kill people. It’s ONLY task is to make money… and this is what Huffman, and more importantly even those controlling his strings behind him, are trying to do. If a few fathers, mothers, children, and maybe several adjoining households all burn up in flames as a result of bad advice given on the website, that only matters insofar as it can legally be tied back to them. Hence, the guy doing the testing of train wheels was literally FIRED for doing his job properly, as his managers were all trying to look good for their own bosses without bothering to actually BE good, b/c that takes a lot more investment.
And there are so very, VERY many stories like that. One that sticks in my mind is a famous tax prep company that predated upon returning soldiers and college students, which eventually was caught for their intentional predatory tactics (which they outright bragged about in internal company communications, looking down on those suckers who trusted them) and faced major consequences, but the thing is: the CEO that did it moved to some tropical location in the world (Greece if I am not mistaken), and then like a decade passed before the system could catch up to “punish” the corporation. So retirees who trusted their life savings to a variety of investments including that company with a solid reputation were burned, but the actual guy who did it was long gone. So long as people like Huffman, Bezos, Musk, Eisner and the like are playing with OUR money, OUR time & vounteer efforts, OUR knowledge, etc., they seem to feel very free to gamble (others not so much: not every company is evil, but some are, and the lack of justice to reign them in is very damaging to society). The risk for them is only very slight - what? they won’t make money as quickly as they otherwise would, leaving their investments sitting in a bank to earn interest? - and the consequences for failure, even for literal crimes, are virtually nill, whenever those can fall onto some OTHER, future CEO, rather than themselves.
And in this case, if someone burns down their house while tinkering, that is not Reddit’s fault, the lawyers will argue. Technically that is even true. More to the point, it is simply not a priority for them, any longer: having built up that reputation, they are now switching focus to exclusively looking to monetize it, prior promises be damned, and to the detriment of future visitors trusting in the old reputation.
I do not own a home or did anything related so I never bothered to visit your sub, but I can see where you provided a service, and want to thank you for that. For while it lasted, it was a good thing to have offered. Now… fuck spez, but I hope you find your way forward. You deserve peace after what Reddit put you through:-). Yes, people may literally die, but that will always be true in a large variety of ways (of old age if nothing else - sorry if I seem flippant but to clarify I am seriously saying that there is only so much any one person can do about that aspect that is part of the nature of the universe itself), and there is literally nothing you can do about it now: I hope you can find a way to leave that behind, and move forward to do other things. Which I see in the other comment that you will - excellent!:-P
