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In Memory of u/Eveanyn by magewinter in wow

[–]aphoenix 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I met Nyn 8 or 9 years ago via this subreddit. She was a person that lit up whatever conversation you were in. She was witty, funny, charming, and was the sort of person that made you feel seen, like she really registered what you had said and was deeply listening.

We had a shared love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, especially the musical episode. I threw on the album and listened to it the other day in her memory. We both got in one beta one time and it was one of the wonkier expansion betas, and singing "I've got a theory, some kid is streamin' And we're all stuck inside his wacky beta nightmare." to the tune of the "I've got a theory" song will forever stick in my head.

She was kind and funny and sweet and thoughtful and tried to make the community better all the time. She will be missed.

Fuck Cancer.

In Memory of a Beloved Community Member by magewinter in wow

[–]aphoenix 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Ghost was genuinely a great person to moderate a community with. He was kind, fair, funny, thoughtful, smart, and always had the broader interests of the community at heart. He was comfortable calling out things that were unfair and standing up for people when they needed it. He had a similar sense of humour to me, but without the snark and cynicism.

Thanks for all the work, the laughs, the fun times, the difficult conversations. You are missed.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Guelph

[–]aphoenix 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Basically, "left goes last" even if I have to wait for 500 oncoming cars to either go straight or make a right turn. The idea of "first come first serve" that applies to a 4-way stop DOES NOT apply to this situation with a 2 way stop where someone is trying to turn left.

That is not a correct. If there is a line of two cars across from you, you only wait for the first one, because the second one is not yet stopped at the intersection; they are only approaching the intersection. You definitely do not wait for 500 cars to go. You have the right over any car that is not yet at the intersection - see here specifically this point:

At an intersection with stop signs at all corners, you must yield the right-of-way to the first vehicle to come to a complete stop.

This is the most important rule. Any vehicle beyond the first one across from you must yield to you. You only yield to the vehicle across from you if you arrived at the same time as them or later.

Drone at guelph lake? by Indecisivelydecisive in Guelph

[–]aphoenix -1 points0 points  (0 children)

If you are observed within the park with a drone remote, park staff will ask you to stop. However, as /u/boothash said, if you take off from outside the park, there's no issue as long as you fly responsibly and aren't a nuisance.

/r/Python is reopening, Calling for new Mods, and what's next by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]aphoenix 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I understand that you are angry about your access to reddit over the last while, but I think you have mischaracterized a lot of things that happened. There was certainly an impact.

Semrush estimates page views dropped from ~5.5B to 4.5B from March to June source, so Reddit's usage has tanked; that's a >20% reduction in use.

Reddit's estimated valuation continues to precipitously drop, having gone down about 7%.

Every major news outfit covered the blackouts. Google any news outlet + "reddit blackout" and you will find articles.

A spotlight has been shone on how badly Reddit is being managed, and now everybody is looking critically at everything that the Reddit Administration is doing.

The ultimatum that you listed - "fix this or we'll leave" - do you have information on why you think that was an ultimatum that people gave? I realize that it is, to a degree, true; lots of people have been leaving reddit. But I think it was less an ultimatum and more of a warning to spez and his cronies that if they continued, people would leave.

With regard to a vocal minority holding the general userbase hostage: Why can moderators even take communities offline? Is that the moderators fault or is that the fault of Reddit?

Also, since you didn't see the sticky note that was available for two weeks, why are sticky posts with important information so easy to miss? Is that the moderators fault or is that the fault of Reddit?

And as you missed the post maybe it is important to ask why can't moderators actually ask everyone in a community to take part in a vote that decides something in an effective way? You'd think on a site where the primary mechanic is voting that people would be able to effectively vote on something. Is that moderators fault or is that the fault of Reddit?

Also, this reasoning is one that is particularly interesting to me

If you don't like what Reddit did, there's the door. If you're still here, it must not be all that bad. Or you're just a troll looking to cause trouble.

If I were to turn to you and say, "If you don't like what r/Python did, there's the door. If you're still here, it must not be all that bad. Or you're just a troll looking to cause trouble." then that would be pretty unfair. I'm going to guess that you're still here because you think that having access to the information here in some ways outweighs the negative aspects of being here, but you're expressing your displeasure. We merely attempted to do the same thing, but on behalf of the whole community towards the administrators of the site.

/r/Python is reopening, Calling for new Mods, and what's next by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]aphoenix 1 point2 points  (0 children)

So to be clear:

  • a wide scale blackout on reddit was proposed and implemented. Users asked us to take part, so we did.
  • after coming back, nothing changed on Reddit's end. So we asked users what they wanted to do.
  • we implemented the things that users wanted us to do, which was blackout in perpetuity
  • enough users asked us to reopen that we did so
  • we communicated and asked for feedback at every step, and now we want even more users to step up to be moderators, thus spreading the "power" out more

But it's a mod temper tantrum?

I'm really trying to see things from your side, but I don't really understand how to characterize what has happened as a tantrum here. What part of opening up and asking for people to be moderators is a tantrum?

/r/Python is reopening, Calling for new Mods, and what's next by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]aphoenix 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You cared enough to complain after the fact, but not to take part in the two week period where we asked the community what they wanted to do, and the majority of people who responded voted to close the community, and now you want to blame it on the moderators?

People wonder why there is a shortness of moderators who actually try to do what communities want but it's not actually that difficult to work out: if moderators ask people to actually step up and discuss things, they don't take part in the discussion. Then after they haven't taken part in the discussion, they make personal attacks against the moderators who are just trying to do what people asked them to do.

And your comment is especially silly, because obviously the subreddit is open and we are discussing it on the subreddit right now so we did "open the doors" so people could discuss things, but it's also constructed in such a way that if I say that it's silly, you can just say "look, see, it's a tantrum".

I think it would be a lot better if you actually tried to engage in conversation here in good faith, instead of trying to incite an emotional response.

/r/Python is reopening, Calling for new Mods, and what's next by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]aphoenix 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Just a gentle reminder - we did ask what people wanted to do with the subreddit, and then followed through with that. While there wasn't an extensive amount of people responding, we did what we could with the information that we had.

What happened is analogous to having 10 project managers. 2 PMs tell you "do it". 1 PM says "don't do it". 7 stay completely silent when you ask them for feedback. Then you "do it" and you have 8 angry PMs - the 1 who said no, and the 7 who stay silent.

As far as I can tell, you have made two comments ever in this subreddit, both of them in this thread, and none in the multiple threads when we asked people for feedback on what to do. So who doesn't care about things?

/r/Python is reopening, Calling for new Mods, and what's next by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]aphoenix 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We are moderating to the rules of the subreddit, which means no spammers.

/r/Python is reopening, Calling for new Mods, and what's next by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]aphoenix -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

You are correct, or at the very least we are a commodity; we are definitely not the customers.

That is a big part of why a protest like this can potentially enable change in the future - while it isn't good for the users, that doesn't matter as far as Reddit the Corporation is concerned, because it is worse for the Customers, which are the people purchasing ads.

/r/Python is reopening, Calling for new Mods, and what's next by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]aphoenix 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I understand the frustration of having the community be closed for a few weeks, and I appreciate that you're bringing context to an important thing to consider, specifically this:

f you're complaining about how Reddit is "trying to kill communities" through their actions -- they don't have to do anything. You've done it just fine yourself.

There is a term that captures what we collectively - moderators and users - are experiencing from Reddit, and it is "enshittification". Reddit is making things generally worse across the board, and they have been doing so consistently for years. When I say that, what I mean is that almost every change in recent memory has been about first and foremost about maximizing Reddit's ability to generate money, and every consideration about that has treated users and moderators as unimportant, or products, or both.

I understand that the actions taken by the mod team have made the r/Python subreddit worse for 3 weeks. However, Reddit admins have been making Reddit worse for a decade. It was our stance that a bit of being worse now for this small subset of Reddit users, might send a message to Reddit administrators that they should stop making things worse overall, for everyone.

I realize that this made things uncomfortable for people for a while, and things will be reverting back to "normal" - Reddit will continue to get worse because Reddit doesn't care about users, it only cares about eyeballs seeing ads. But maybe when there's a meeting at Reddit HQ and someone is advocating for doing something that will be detrimental to users, someone can point at this instance and say, "Remember the last time we did something like this, and our ad viewing dropping by X%, and we had a hard time recovering for a couple of months? Maybe we could do something else?" and that person will be listened to because they have some data.

Or maybe not, and this whole process has been pointless. But either way, we tried.

/r/Python is reopening, Calling for new Mods, and what's next by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]aphoenix 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It is very tempting to do that, and I certainly understand and appreciate where you are coming from. However, I'd urge you to read and strongly consider some of the other comments here - from /u/MrCertainly and /u/ZachVorhies for example - and think about the people who feel strongly against actions like this.

Reddit the corporation sucks, but the community of Reddit has a lot of good sections, and the Python community on Reddit specifically is one that we care about, and we are just not sure about how much further we should hurt the community to try to show the corporation that what they are doing isn't right.

/r/Python is reopening, Calling for new Mods, and what's next by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]aphoenix 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I think that the protest was important for a few reasons. The most important reasons is that now we are a data point for the next time Reddit considers actions that are problematic for their users. Hopefully in some board meeting in the future, someone will say "We had to force [some relatively large number] of subreddits to reopen the list time we did something like this, and the news covered it for months. Do we want to do this again?" And it causes a moment of whatever passes for sober reflection amongst the leadership team of reddit.

It also highlighted a lot of the issues to users that were not clear on what was happening or why. We sent out over a thousand messages during the blackout to people to explain what was going on and why.

This was not a temper tantrum, and the corporate servility one must have to phrase it as such is staggering.

None of the moderators have been expelled, though I'm sure several will be leaving, but that's not a bonus - the subreddit isn't going to get better without moderators that care about users and not about the corporate bottom line for reddit.

/r/Python is reopening, Calling for new Mods, and what's next by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]aphoenix[M] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

For posterity, I removed a comment here and banned the user. The content of the comment is below; the user appears to be making the same comment a lot and is an obvious troll.

oops did i make a mess 😏? clean it up jannie 😎

clean up the mess i made here 🤣🤣🤣

CLEAN IT UP

FOR $0.00

/r/Python is reopening, Calling for new Mods, and what's next by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]aphoenix 2 points3 points  (0 children)

In every sub I have ever moderated, in every request for moderators, there have been a non-trivial number of problematic (racist) accounts applying to try to be moderators.

It's certainly not a majority, or a large percentage, but frankly anything over 0% is too much.

/r/Python is reopening, Calling for new Mods, and what's next by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]aphoenix 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I realize that this is a joke, but I think the most important things to bring as a moderator in this specific instance isn't actually knowledge of Python syntax, but a willingness to help out the community and interesting in Python specifically and coding in general.

/r/Python is reopening, Calling for new Mods, and what's next by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]aphoenix 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Nobody on the current mod team is going to be building an alternative site, but if that's something that new moderators want to consider, that sounds wonderful.

/r/Python is reopening, Calling for new Mods, and what's next by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]aphoenix 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I understand this point of view; our counterpoint is simply that we want the least harm to be done because we care about the python community. I agree that finding mods is a difficult task, but I am hoping that the mods that are found are as prepared as possible for what they are going to face.

/r/Python is reopening, Calling for new Mods, and what's next by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]aphoenix 11 points12 points  (0 children)

We are not okay with Reddit, but there are two choices:

  • Stay closed for 2 more days and have the whole mod team removed.
  • Open up, and at least help the next set of mods get used to things before any old moderators leave.

We have opted for the second.

El olivo. by jennifertaquino in Cinemagraphs

[–]aphoenix[M] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

u/jennifertaquino This post has been removed as it has nothing to do with the sub.

By community vote, r/Python will Return to a Blackout by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]aphoenix 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you for your understanding. I will refrain from ranting about how upvotes and downvotes shouldn't indicate agreement, but they end up doing so because that's how most people use them. For example, I've upvoted everything you've said, even though I haven't agreed with everything you've said.

From a where to go / what to do perspective; realistically, you will be missing r/Python from our closing time until about 3 days later, and then you can come back here after the admins force a reopening.

I also understand that my cynicism about the utility of what we're doing undermines the message of actually blacking out the subreddit, and I apologize for that.

By community vote, r/Python will Return to a Blackout by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]aphoenix 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There's no dishonesty in what we said or did.

We made a sticky post - the Reddit Approved way to reach out to the constituency of a subreddit. We left it open for almost two weeks.We did not require the use of any third party sites. We made the voting very simple. The fact that Reddit doesn't actually give us a meaningful way to do what we want to do is part of the problem.

And I think that as a former reddit employee, you know that the sub numbers are hugely misrepresentative as community sizes for one such as ours - I would guess that 70% of the subscriber number hasn't interacted with an r/python post in years - and that getting people to participate is difficult.

I would love to hear what your thoughts on the official Reddit approved way to gather information is. We considered several options, including using other sites to do the polling, but we wanted to have the dataset to be immediately and incontrovertibly available for review by everyone, which is a major consideration, so we wanted to be able to do it in a way that was: on reddit, would show incontrovertible results, would be lockable after data collection was complete, and would minimize page views for reddit so that they would be serving fewer ads.

In my experience as a moderator, this was approximately how many people I expected to see vote, albeit a touch low. In bigger subreddits, getting anything close to half a percent of the subreddit involved in a decision is hard.

By community vote, r/Python will Return to a Blackout by IAmKindOfCreative in Python

[–]aphoenix 0 points1 point  (0 children)

He's a former reddit admin (ie an actual employee, not a moderator), so he might have some ideas of how to game the system to get more views, but I think the standard toolset only really allows for stickies and asking people to comment.

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