Concerns of Redditor safety, jeopardized research amid new mods and API rules.

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.

  • 0110010001100010@lemmy.world
    6·
    1 year ago

    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)!

    • OpenStars@kbin.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      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)

      • 0110010001100010@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • OpenStars@kbin.social
          2·
          1 year ago

          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:-).