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
lol if there is one mod on reddit I am glad to see banned it is this one
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?
But… his shiny! Won’t you think of his shiny?!
Hahaha awkwardtheturtle is a horrible online bully, now they’re begging for their fake internet power back, brilliant.
Honestly, if they use their current rage to join the protests with all the firepower they can muster, then it’s a win-win-win.
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
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”.
this. I know many power mods, they just bring in new mods and replace you if you aren’t active.
Or just replace you even if you’re active and stand up against them being assholes to the community.
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.
Why would they need to reply to every post? I think most of them would take maybe 10 seconds to validate.
Trust me, there are plenty of mods who do that. Reddit relies on addiction for free labor.
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.
And not even a real internet forum with some connection to the world, like a forum for engineers or something, but just these generic cat video style forums that don’t really add huge value to anyone’s life. Your entire existence is to fill the 30-second void for people standing in elevators.
You nailed it.
“I haven’t even done anything in 6 months” is a really funny statement to make as mod. Apparently they never considered just… not being a mod for a place they don’t care about?
tbh with him being a mod in so many subs i wonder how he never got fired for being inactive or how no one thought what human can mod 100+ subs and sleep eat get groceries and still have time to adequately moderate their sub on top of being a well known power mod hated by everyone who knows about them just what are the people who run these subs like what is going on in their heads when adding moderators
I’ve been learning from reading through mod posts from the small(ish) subreddits I’m a part of that a TON of mods are inactive, and asking admin to remove that mod went nowhere, big surprise.
Also mods that care mostly about their particular subreddit and interest do a great job there, but might not be on the rest of reddit enough to know what’s going on. In one of the subreddits turtle modded, they saw that they’d been banned from reddit but didn’t know anything about turtle the inactive-for-years mod or any context.
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.
We already are seeing this issue with users like kombuchawow
Most recently they falsely accused someone of posting AI art https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/zxse22/rart_mod_accuses_artist_of_using_ai_and_when/
This person is a huge problem and has been for years: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/reddit-campaign-against-moderator-awkwardtheturtle/
We’re watching the public service that is the information superhighway be born and be killed in only a few generations.
Wait… The moderator was amazing turtle? I didn’t see who made the message on the original post. Is there a source of this?
deleted by creator
rip bozo.
No more powermods. Burn reddit down.
I really don’t want to see the worst of reddit on this site. Turts put wayyy too much of their time into reddit and made it way too much of their sense of self worth. That being said the insane shit he had to put up with from people would drive anyone to a dark place. Shit there are even other users who redditors assume are a Turt alt that are getting harassed. If you have any vested interest in this topic at all, you are exactly as much of the problem as Turtle. Let reddit burn along with all your hate for the former mods and move the fuck on.
I even have no idea who this guy is lol
Let’s not be too hard on him. Being mod over 1000+ is a mental illness that reddit forced us to put up with.
