I think this is the death knoll for the protest unfortunately. Shitposting hurts the user experience, but it doesn’t really hurt reddit. In a week or two the casual users will revolt against the protests and the mods will feel like they have lost popular support and cave.
Hopefully enough people have fully left the platform to cause reddit some pain. But honestly I think reddit would rather have a smaller easier to manipulate user base of new users rather than keeping all the oldest and most cynical users.
I think the action should be coordinated with a migration to lemmy, every user who complains about the lack of quality content you forward (via comments) to the counterpart here
Yep. If no alternative is put forward then nothing will change.
It’s burning the barn down. Sure, new subs will happen, but they will be harder to find, and they need to re-establish the rules. It also makes monetization hard. All those ads sold against specific subs are worthless. And now reddit doesn’t know what subs it can sell ads against. Basically they can only sell ads generally to the entire site. This hits Reddit in the wallet. Also, it mucks up selling the data to AI companies.
Long term, I think you are correct. But short term reddit is trying to IPO. This whole protest will devalue any IPO and cause investors to think twice.
I think it’s obvious that Reddit will remove the mods if shit posting continues.
I also think it’s obvious this isn’t the quick fix people keep pretending it is.
Pick a totally new user? Might be a shitty mod and not able to handle the shitposting anyway.
Pick an existing mod that’s willing to play ball? That’s what they did with /r/piracy, which is now John Oliver themed anyway.
It does hurt Reddit, the user experience is what keeps people browsing it. If the user experience deteriorates, so does engagement.
But right now it’s bringing eyeballs to see the spectacle. To be effective these need to persist long past the point where it isn’t “fun” anymore.
Spez likely is looking at this and seeing:
- He can make mods jump by threatening to move ownership of the subreddit
- Numbers are up as people engage with this fad
- Once users tire of this he can trot out the same threats and take over the subreddits anyway
Edit: just to make it clear I’m not saying I think this is fine for Reddit long term. I’ve just had this conversation with too many MBAs to not know this is how they’d look at all of this.
Didn’t mean to write so much and rant. But the main point of agreement with you is the first paragraph.
You are likely correct on the fact that normie users are pissed off. One of my co-workers (that always reminds me he doesn’t use Reddit aside from if he needs to sell or trade PC parts) wouldn’t stfu about how it was stupid and “all just about some power-tripping mods” all because HardwareSwap was considering going longer and he was trying to list some parts (due to a different freakout reaction over needing to downsize his PC to have money in savings after a mass purge of some leaders at work). He was mildly okay with it at first because the automods thing being impacted by the new API stuff. All that “okayness” was completely right out the window after that specific thing was adjusted by Reddit.
So while he isn’t a normal day to day viewer of the site, I imagine that most of the “I don’t pay attention to politics/policies” users (which I think of as the bulk “normie” mainstream users) are not far behind his sentiment. I did ask if he tried other options, like big Discord servers like LTT/GN or other big PC based YT channel fan servers. Or even forums of those channels/sites. He just wanted to removed about the amount of users being so low. Which I also reminded him that r/HardwareSwap was tiny at some point too and there were smaller subs that he could at least try as they would have higher traffic while the big ones were down.
Protests are supposed to make people frustrated and cause normal operations to be messed up. But in the US, we are just taught to hate anyone or groups that dare protest in ways that impact daily functions. We are told that the only “correct” protests are to be in a pre-selected spot out of the way of everyone else. Or maybe a one-off march with speakers just saying how things are wrong and have people cheer and then leave. And reactionaries are supposed to be the ones that everyone supports because they are (like the majority of people/users) “not hear for politics and don’t care.” They are also the main thing stopping new unions from forming. Which does seem to line up with how much Lenin was correct in speaking about no revolutions are going to win if those folks can’t be won over. Which requires being fully ready and willing to be lashed out at, and stand firm in keeping up the effort and care about them no matter what.
I’m just hoping the protests have forced enough like-minded people into the Fediverse that the culture Reddit had (then lost) will resurface.
All mods had to do was collectively say they are no longer going to moderate. Let’s see how quickly reddit admins cave when they need to pay moderators or have the site filled with stuff even 4chan doesn’t allow.
Exactly this, don’t make them dark, leave the unpaid work and let it rot
