Spam bots have a preset spam limit. Knowing their weakness, we can send wave after wave of mods at them until they reach their limit and shut down.

Don’t they know we’re running out of math?! And they’re wasting it on silly pictures and weird symbols?

Exactly. This is only a “stupid” decision if your only metrics for success are unmitigated growth and content/comment quantity.

Yes, for a community to thrive there needs to be some minimum viable threshold of active participants, but that threshold isn’t “as many users as we can possibly get.” Just like there’s a bottom limit, there is a sort of carrying capacity as an upper limit. Out of control population growth will quickly make an ecosystem inhospitable which will kill a community just as surely as not having enough members to sustain itself.

I agree with this. One of the more irritating things about places like Reddit is that they’re full of low effort content and conversations get filled with a lot of noise from people who don’t really want to meaningfully contribute.

you can shoot people dead, but you can‘t shoot them to work

Well fucking put.

There are a lot of people who take it personally when confronted with the idea that someone else is making an ethical choice that they, themselves, are not. When they hear someone say “I made this personal choice,” their ego warps it into “I made this personal choice and if you don’t, you’re a bad person.”

It’s simply low empathy behavior. They struggle to contextualize other people’s thoughts and decisions outside of their own personal experience and beliefs.

I’m surprised they even waited this long. Of course, unprivatizing subs is one thing, but let’s see them try to moderate all of that content without the unpaid workforce that they’ve been used to. If a mod team is willing to take a sub private, it’s a pretty clear sign that they’re not going to give up and get back to work if their sub is forcibly made active again.

The shit show is only going to get worse from here.

Exactly. The original aim of the war was the annex Ukraine completely.

It’s such a shame what happened to the creators. They’ve even encouraged people to pirate it.