Shocked Pikachu face meme.
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Landed gentry!
When I read that I never went back.
I never fully understand that, is that an insult? English ain't my first language and I was honestly not sure if I felt offended by that lol, I swear I looked for it on the web, but it wasn't clear for me either.
"Landed gentry" was a social class of people who owned estates and, well, land. They didn't have to work; they made their income by profiting off the work of the farm hands, merchants, etc, who worked on their land. The estates these landed gentry owned, along with their wealth, would be passed down to their children when they died. It meant the gentry did very little to earn their station in life, but still had a fair amount of power and wealth.
How spez thinks it applies to Reddit mods, I'm not entirely sure. But he definitely meant it as an insult. His full quote was:
So I guess he was upset that mod teams get to select who else is a good fit to join the mod team? Of course, the issue is that he is the landed gentry - users didn't vote for him, nor can they remove him; and he's profiting off the work of the people who post content and the people who spend their time moderating.
Right wing turds like Steve tend to project really hard and never have the capacity to realize it.
It's interesting that he's using an insult from England and in a context which would make him Royalty trying to control the Barons.
He has to just be riling up the "freeze peach" crowd with that line. He must know that a "users vote" way of selecting mods is always going to be a race to the bottom in terms of diversity and quality as nobody with a unique vision is going to subject themselves to the will of a bunch of reddit-brained people.
When I was part of the Vaxxhappened protest I came to the realization that pretty much all mods of big communities are not "power happy" autocrats, but on the whole surprisingly weak-willed and living in a perpetual fear of getting removed. It was sad, but I have to imagine Reddit Inc is very happy with the arrangement. These people are working 24/7 for free, on one of the many indistinguishable feeds of memes. I was very surprised the API protest happened to the degree it did at all.
It’s an insult. It’s basically saying “these people are powerful and out of touch and have no right to it”. As opposed to the reality that yeah there’s mod abuse, but also it’s a thankless job that sucks but you keep doing it because you care about the community and when you ease up you get criticism, when you crack down you get criticism, and when you try to be transparent you spend so much time writing out why you made a decision that you hesitate to actually moderate and also you wind up getting dragged into arguments over the validity of one of three fucking rules because they didn’t like that specific rule that couldn’t be clearer. And no matter what you do you’re going to get abuse in the modmail.
Yeah, the problem is that the subs used to be the only place on the internet where a given community could be mainstream, so being in a position of power means you're stuck trying to make everybody happy.
On federated networks you can have multiple communities with the same local name coexisting, so if you don't like one set of mods you can go elsewhere. I'm not saying that solves all the problems, but it takes off the pressure of being the piracy sub mod.
Yeah but breakaway communities existed then. Underscore, rename, different order… all this shit was there. You can have the same name now which is cool, but you always could have something close. It’s the community and users people care about and starting a new one is a pain in the ass
There's a big advantage to having the sub with the most obvious name. If you want to talk about Canada you're going to go to /r/canada first, not /r/onguardforthee.
To give you some background on the term, it refers to rich land owners in England who had a lot of inherited wealth through the estates they owned (landed, meaning they own land). These "gentry" generally led lives of leisure and wealth, but they didn't actually do anything, they just inherited it all through their family wealth and land ownership.
I'm sure I have details of that a little off, but that's my best explanation of it.