“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:
And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.
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.
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.
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“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.
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.
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.