Conversation

It's probably pretty easy for Reddit executives to sniff and say, "Well you know the user base, they're making a big to-do about nothing; they'll figure out how to moderate without those tools, they're hardly critical."

Mastodonians are smarter than to do that, but we have a bit of a problem of falling down at the next step. It's great that people here don't scorn the idea that affordances matter to user behavior, but the next step is to actually find out how affordances actually do affect user behavior.

Like, we could imagine a more enlightened Reddit not cutting off its moderators at the knee by shutting down the API access they needed. But we could also imagine an even more enlightened Reddit than that, one that built its own versions of those moderator tools right into its own platform, so that moderators didn't have to use third party tools across the API.

But we could also imagine an even more enlightened Reddit than *that*.

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