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.
I mean, Reddit deserves to be punished, and there are many reasons to be upset (I personally shredded all my contributions and deleted my account in protest), but I kinda feel like the canning safety issue might be overblown. Nothing is stopping them from staying and calling out unsafe recipes with comments/in association with the new moderators. Sure, they have to go through the new mods to fully remove things, and their removal in the first place raises significant ethical questions, but calling this a safety issue because “someone else could get it wrong” seems like they’re reaching.
Hey — one of the former mods of r/Canning here.
I don’t want to see people get sick, and I don’t want to see people die from what usually amounts to less than $5 worth of home canned food.
But that doesn’t mean I’m now bound for eternity to Reddit to help ensure they don’t hurt anybody. That only helps Reddit. After what they put us through I’ve stopped any and all contributions to their ungrateful website.
Nor does it mean I have to stop criticizing Reddit for choosing questionable mods to replace us.
Thanks for taking the time to respond, even though I was critical! Sure, I have no disagreement with anything you said in your reply. I’m also involved in hobbies where bad information can hurt people (including canning and foraging for mushrooms), and I’m obviously against knowledgeable people being removed from positions of authority in these communities. This post bolds the text about being worried that new mods may miss something that the old mods wouldn’t, which could lead to someone getting hurt. I saw that, and that a couple of early comments latched onto it as a focus. I had broccoli in a wok that I needed to get back to and just fired off a quick comment as a bit of infernal advocacy that the replacement of mod powers probably isn’t as dire as the quote makes it sound.
It is not. The mere fact that someone is likely to get some info wrong is not a fact that is in question, only the likelihood of its occurrence is, and quite frankly neither you nor I are qualified to know how often such posts were submitted and rejected, but I have a hunch that the former mods of those exact subs just might?
It reminds me of the story where a guy was fired b/c he refused to lie and state that the train wheels were okay when in fact they were overheating (this was in the USA but probably similar stories happen in most countries, so really is much more broadly applicable). This was back in February of this year iirc. Now we know that many people have died as a result of derailments since then - and potentially worse yet, some will suffer illnesses for an entire lifetime and extremely possibly (even likely, even certain if I am not mistaken) for another generation or few from now, as a result of the carcinogens released into those areas.
Again, for emphasis: NOW we know that, but even back THEN, it still would have been a true fact that “train derailments are more likely than they were in the past, b/c of the reduction in safety controls”. We did not need to wait for people to die to be able to believe that, it was always true, and imagine a wonderful world where nobody at all had to die, b/c having seen the reduction in safety controls, someone acted and placed new controls in place that prevented it.
The fact here is that info obtained from Reddit is less “safe” than it used to be. Hopefully nobody has to die to prove that conclusively. Ofc all info on the internet should be subjected to scrutiny, but not everyone is so cautious, and moreover, “transitions” especially can be harsh, i.e. from a resource (e.g. a particular sub) that had developed an EARNED reputation for providing only safe info, to now where the sub has the same name, but has a totally different internal structure, with fewer to no safety controls inside.
That is my two cents anyway, fwiw.
Mod of /r/homeautomation here (mentioned in the article as “Dan”) and yeah, you pretty much nailed it. In our case the biggest concern was amateurs working with electricity. The “which wire is which” posts were often greeted with a “black hot, white neutral” response which on the surface is generally correct. However, there are lots of cases (especially in houses older than say 20 years) where that can be wrong and dangerous. It’s further complicated by the fact that multiple live circuits can exist in the same box so even if you killed power to the light you are working on the box may still have live wires.
As with canning, homeowners dying from electrocution is rare, but it doesn’t negate the danger. I’ll wire shit hot all the time (much to my wife’s annoyance) but I’ve been doing this for years and with lots of guidance and supervision. I will also very much KNOW what’s hot and what’s not both through a no-contact probe and a voltmeter. Electricity isn’t something people should be messing around with if they don’t have at least a basic understanding.
I’ve rambled long enough, lol. Funny enough, I also live in the state where the train derailment happened in February (though I was nowhere near it).
The problem, as I understand it, is that a company has no legal responsibility to NOT kill people. It’s ONLY task is to make money… and this is what Huffman, and more importantly even those controlling his strings behind him, are trying to do. If a few fathers, mothers, children, and maybe several adjoining households all burn up in flames as a result of bad advice given on the website, that only matters insofar as it can legally be tied back to them. Hence, the guy doing the testing of train wheels was literally FIRED for doing his job properly, as his managers were all trying to look good for their own bosses without bothering to actually BE good, b/c that takes a lot more investment.
And there are so very, VERY many stories like that. One that sticks in my mind is a famous tax prep company that predated upon returning soldiers and college students, which eventually was caught for their intentional predatory tactics (which they outright bragged about in internal company communications, looking down on those suckers who trusted them) and faced major consequences, but the thing is: the CEO that did it moved to some tropical location in the world (Greece if I am not mistaken), and then like a decade passed before the system could catch up to “punish” the corporation. So retirees who trusted their life savings to a variety of investments including that company with a solid reputation were burned, but the actual guy who did it was long gone. So long as people like Huffman, Bezos, Musk, Eisner and the like are playing with OUR money, OUR time & vounteer efforts, OUR knowledge, etc., they seem to feel very free to gamble (others not so much: not every company is evil, but some are, and the lack of justice to reign them in is very damaging to society). The risk for them is only very slight - what? they won’t make money as quickly as they otherwise would, leaving their investments sitting in a bank to earn interest? - and the consequences for failure, even for literal crimes, are virtually nill, whenever those can fall onto some OTHER, future CEO, rather than themselves.
And in this case, if someone burns down their house while tinkering, that is not Reddit’s fault, the lawyers will argue. Technically that is even true. More to the point, it is simply not a priority for them, any longer: having built up that reputation, they are now switching focus to exclusively looking to monetize it, prior promises be damned, and to the detriment of future visitors trusting in the old reputation.
I do not own a home or did anything related so I never bothered to visit your sub, but I can see where you provided a service, and want to thank you for that. For while it lasted, it was a good thing to have offered. Now… fuck spez, but I hope you find your way forward. You deserve peace after what Reddit put you through:-). Yes, people may literally die, but that will always be true in a large variety of ways (of old age if nothing else - sorry if I seem flippant but to clarify I am seriously saying that there is only so much any one person can do about that aspect that is part of the nature of the universe itself), and there is literally nothing you can do about it now: I hope you can find a way to leave that behind, and move forward to do other things. Which I see in the other comment that you will - excellent!:-P