Tangent

Do you know of any generators that create things that are in English, seem normal at first glance, but are actually nonsensical? Things like "has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?"

I'd like something plausible enough to be accepted by an AI model but that ends up making it sound like it's having a stroke.

Reddit's paid workforce is (was) about 700 strong. They just laid off 90 people. There are about 21,000 moderators that are active on a daily basis; each of them moderating subs on topics they're passionate about and are very familiar with. It's gonna be fun to watch the results if every current mod quits and they actually have to provide paid moderation.

It was a combination of the absurd pricing for the third party apps and that the people most affected by this would be not only those with accessibility issues, but the mods who do damn near all the day-to-day operations of the site. Reddit relies on unpaid moderators to keep subs from turning into bot spamming grounds and the official app is more difficult to use for basic functions and doesn't support many of them at all.

So they were essentially giving the finger to their unpaid workforce and then claiming that the complainers were mad about no longer getting everything for free. It's a pretty hefty dose of hypocrisy.

My money's on the chairman not learning from the experience either; he still blamed you even though he was totally unable to find a way to actually blame you.

Having spent the last couple of decades in tech support I'd say you're being very generous with the estimate of ~20% of people being willing and able to read so they can understand something...

Besides being too cheap, it's honestly not even practical. There are about 21,000 active mods on any given day. Replacing even half of that number would increase their current staffing of ~700 by 15 fold which doesn't seem likely given they just laid off 90 of them. That doesn't even touch on the fact that those moderators would know nothing about the subs they're now supposed to be taking care of.

Nah, you're totally right, this is the beginning of the end. The blackout might not do anything short term but they're certainly going to shed enough mods that quality will slip. Once that happens people will be looking for alternatives and Reddit will end up on the scrap heap of "used to be great" like so many that came before.

Well Steve, it's not profitable for me to be a moderator for free either. Feel free to let me know how profitable you think you'll be after hiring enough staff to replace all the mods that'll be leaving.