I never ran across that account but it blows me away that this article is two years old. In a way I hope that the account gets unbanned. I am not sure that kind of personality should have any reason to discover the Lemmyverse. Let it stay Reddit’s problem.
Couldn’t have happened to a nicer fella… AwkwardTheTurtle famous power mod known to steal peoples posts, ban them and re-upload them.
I’m sorry, I do not feel bad. lol
Even power users do not like him one bit
That’s how much reddit cares about you even if you did the job of tons and tons of paid employees.
Also: if you haven’t interacted with a sub in 6 months should you still be a mod?
how tf do you even meaningfully mod 1000 subs? 2 is plenty
Their entire identity revolved around reddit. They devoted their entire life to the site. With that level of commitment you find the time.
Even if you spent 20 hours a day on the site, every day, there’s no way to have meaningful interactions with 1000 communities.
Clearly what they’re committed to is collecting subreddit. Collecting them like baseball cards: Looking at them, smiling, and then stuffing them in a box, never to be looked at again.
I even can’t imagine doing that without being compensated. It just seems so far past the extreme.
How do you know that there’s only one person working the account? When you’re a reddit moderator, it’s anonymous (same on Wikipedia). For all we know, all the power mods are working at a PR firm somewhere. Spreading misinformation could be their full-time job. Controlling the flow of information on Reddit and Wikipedia could be worth more than Reddit’s actual profit.
For all we know, all the power mods are working at a PR firm somewhere
are you guessing or stating that as a fact, and if the latter, do you have any sources for that
https://www.vice.com/en/article/kwpqmn/is-the-pr-industry-buying-influence-over-wikipedia
They’re probably smart enough to not get caught nowadays.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/13/facebook-azerbaijan-ilham-aliyev https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-azerbaijan-troll-farm
they are caught, and you have to get out of the way to make it tick, as in, you can’t just call someone at facebook and say “hey i have elections coming up, can you censor all of opposition and handle me list of dissenters uwu” and expect them to comply. you have to pay
spineless propagandists for hirePR agency to do that job for youwikipedia edit history is public record, so it’s more of an issue of combing through it. being not for profit and much more transparent than fb helps with that https://gizmodo.com/wikipedia-russia-ukraine-propaganda-suspicious-edits-1849673060
Actually, the government did just call up Twitter and tell them to censor things. That’s the whole point of the Matt Taibbi Twitter Files stories. But you also have other non-government groups policing the Internet, calling up Twitter/Facebook/Google/etc and demanding censorship.
Twitter Files story
ah yes, a story that ultimately comes from elon musk and elon musk only. that’s obviously true, because when musk has to choose between his own agenda and healthy public discourse, you can trust him to never stir shit in a way he thinks will favour him. we all know that he never proposed hyperloop to quash californian high speed rail, for example. he also obviously is completely neutral and has no agenda. you see, he unbanned all these russian propagandists, nazis and other shitbags just because he is such a free speech absolutist and entirely not because he wanted to> For example, if you control the mainstream media and big tech, you can make an issue seem like a huge problem by overhyping it everywhere.
For example, if you control the mainstream media and big tech, you can make an issue seem like a huge problem by overhyping it everywhere.
your words, not mine. musk wen full on “waaah waah they won’t let me overblow this manufactured non-story. they are obviously evil”. that’s because it turns out that conspiracy theorists spend more time on site, pumping up engagement numbers and bringing more ad revenue. this happened to facebook before
yeah this has never crossed my mind before. who would be customer of such company? if you have state level resources, it may be easier to straight out buy the entire place and gradually smother it down, like russian govt did with livejournal picking one by one opposition that congregated there. or you can bring it under your own jurisdiction and spread disinfo as mandated by law
There are conspiracy theories on the Internet that Google and Facebook were created to centralize control of the Internet in a few large corporations, who then would be able to control what information people see. You also have to think bigger than government. Who has more influence? The President? Or the CEO of Blackrock and other large hedge funds, who control all the voting shares in pretty much every public corporation?
For example, if you control the mainstream media and big tech, you can make an issue seem like a huge problem by overhyping it everywhere. You can cover up real problems by never mentioning them at all. The CEO of Google is NOT elected. A couple of hedge fund managers get to pick the CEO of Google.
Conspiracy theory it is. What has happened to the internet is much more easily explained by capitalism. This is what capitalism does.
I bet that you don’t need to follow that conspiracy theory very far before you find someone spouting the old classical antisemitic bullshit.
On every conspiracy theory forum, there’s at least one person posting antisemitic stuff. It’s a standard trick to discredit them. I.e., person A posts a true conspiracy theory X. Person B posts the same conspiracy theory and also something antisemtic. Does that automatically mean X is wrong?
tell me with a straight face that dude who thought that shitty hypermonetized second life knockoff with vr googles is future of internet plans that far, and that accurately
There are conspiracy theories on the Internet that Google and Facebook were created to centralize control of the Internet in a few large corporations, who then would be able to control what information people see
that’s what capitalism can do, and they do that because it’s profitable for them. google seo pollution would run counter to that, right? somebody does that, because while clean access to public information provides no profit for them, putting their own noise there instead - from which they can profit in some way - makes them more money. wouldn’t The Powers That Be intervene if that was the grand strategy?
i’m asking you to take a few steps back and look at a bigger picture. conspiracy theories are full of drivel, but their content is not the most important part. the most important thing about them is circlejerk forming property. if you wanted to investigate mysterious forces, then surely scientific method would be the best tool available, right? they aren’t using it not because it doesn’t work there, it’s because actually using scientific method involves taking frequent Ls and grants no points for your very own special ideas. if you cling to your own idea because it’s your own idea, and are proven wrong you can either: 1. take the L, see how much wrong you were and why, and adjust accordingly, or 2. happily ignore all contrary evidence and paint all your enemies as part of global conspiracy, or maybe repeat measurement, believing you got something wrong, until you get what you want.
the most important thing about conspiracy theories is that it allows believer to feel Special, because they know something all the plebeian masses don’t and that makes them Enlightened, obviously better than anyone else and immune to all criticism. it’s highly corrosive to any critical thought and allows that pattern of thinking to spread from one issue to another. here you have this elaborated in detail by Folding Ideas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44
lol if there is one mod on reddit I am glad to see banned it is this one
The reason was not right, they should have been removed from power ages ago, but at least this collateral damage is a tiny bit of justice served at the end.
Ye mods on reddit ( and on lemmy ) should be at most Moderating 5 maybe 10 subs INCLUDING ALTS.
With lemmy, if someone is squatting a bunch of forums and moderating them, you can always start your own lemmy instance and start your own forum with the same title.
Hah, this is just so pathetic to read.
I don’t use the term “terminally online” often, but this is exactly the time to use it. Imagine being this desperate to cling onto your power over an internet forum, not even for the sake of the community, but for the ego-driven lust for wanting control over others on something as menial as Reddit.
Must be a shock to realize all this was in his head, and he was basically just a pawn to spez and everyone else at the top.
rip bozo.
No more powermods. Burn reddit down.
/c/sadcringe
Reddit mods really do think that they are gonna have special treatment because they are doing unpaid work. They won’t. It’s time to realise Reddit will not relent, abandoning ship is the only way of going forward.
If you’re moderating 1,000 forums, are you really moderating anything?
I’ve been on mod teams with him and some other powermods. They don’t do shit, just have new mods do all the work as they and their friends set up ‘org charts’ according to which they run their subs.
That is an objectively sad life. Imagine people asking what you did with your life and your answer is “I had imaginary power on a now-defunct internet site doing unpaid work day in and day out. I spent hours upon hours of my life creating charts that only apply in this digital universe to make myself feel important while people who scrolled my page for five minutes a day on the subway were out doing things in the real world”.
Could be if each gets like 1 new comment/post per week
they were a moderator of some of the most popular subreddits, so it was definitely more than that
That would still be an enormous task for a single person. Let’s pretend they really only had to deal with not more than a single post from each sub every week:
1,000 comments/posts per week = ca. 142 per day. If that mod takes as little as two minutes to read and properly reply to each of those, that would amount to a daily 4-5 hours of unpaid work in their spare time.
Turtle was active on Reddit about 16 HOURS a day so it was certainly possible. Of course they didn’t actually do much of anything in those subs, they just collected them.
I moderated a couple decently popular subreddits and got a decent chunk of internet points, and even to me the concept of whining this much about losing a reddit account is fucking hilarious
It’s sad that power mods like Turtle have made many people think that all mods are like him.
The mods for the sub of a popular game I play are getting shit on for protesting against Reddit by people who think the mods merely want power. No power mod has ever put thousands of hours into creating free helper apps or maintaining a game wiki.
One must have really nothing to do of their days to hoard sub moderation titles. I don’t even understand why would someone give mod role to someone with 999 other roles. What would you expect to happen between hiring a power thirsty mod or a mod that will not even be actually there.
Wow. Watching reddit melt down has been amazing. I really don’t even care but the popcorn has been so tasty. This news is a caramel coated popcorn ball all by itself.