Only if those new mods know what they're doing. Reddit will run out of people who know what they're doing very quickly. Filling mod positions with randos isn't the same as successfully running a community.
lori
joined 2 years ago
Twitter just needs warm bodies. Reddit relies on users to run the communities. That's the difference. Reddit is the only big site right now where a small number of users leaving angrily can cause serious structural issues for them.
I posted a slightly longer comment about this downthread but unlike other websites like twitter, reddit relies on users to be moderators. This is the one site that can't afford to lose their power users, you can replace them with scabs but the scabs probably don't know how to moderate a community that large and if enough big community mods quit reddit will never catch up. This is one of the only sites right now where the power users being happy actually does matter more than the average user, because they're essentially staffing the site for free.
See this is the problem with reddit. On a site like Twitter, pissing off your power users doesn't matter much. If anything you lighten the server load some if they leave. You have plenty of users to replace them.
On reddit, pissing off the power users means losing the unpaid volunteers keeping your site running. Sure, reddit can just reopen the sub, and probably will. But who's going to moderate it? A sub that big needs a serious mod team. What happens if several other large subs follow them? How is reddit planning to staff all these subs? Will whoever they grab know what they're doing? If enough mod teams resigned in one go reddit would have no way to keep the site working. Even if they find new volunteers it doesn't mean they'll know how to moderate a huge community.
I'm trying out both kbin and lemmy now but I'm not new to fedi. I joined mastodon back in 2016 or 2017, stayed for a bit, eventually forgot about it, came back around Jan 2022 or so? I forget because I checked out several instances before I got on the one I'm on now. I also dabbled in some other fedi software but nothing I spent much time on. I always meant to try Lemmy but obviously recent events reminded me I was going to do that.
I've always been opposed to this kind of branding. Users are users, posts are posts, getting heavy into branding is always a bad sign to me.
You can't throw just anyone in to moderate a gigantic subreddit. They can get a user on the mod list but that doesn't mean they can mod and a poorly moderated subreddit doesn't keep users around long.