I mean don’t get me wrong, its cool a lot of subs have and still are participating in the blackout, but I think it wouldve been better to link a new home for the subreddits participating somewhere in the private message. Show spez, hey if you dont change, we aren’t going to use your site (or use it less).
I think a lot of (Americans, at least) have poorly understood ideas about what protesting is and how it’s supposed to work–in no small part, I think, due to the sanitized way we’re taught about things like the Civil Rights movement. The idea that a simple show of solidarity with an announced end date would, I guess, guilt trip(?) Spez into doing the right thing was always an absurd idea, divorced from reality, and only slightly better than doing nothing at all. There’s been headlines all day about Spez’s comments about waiting for the blackout to blow over, but that’s pretty explicitly what the people behind the blackout said would happen.
Admittedly, prolonged blackouts will probably just lead to the offending moderators being replaced with new, compliant mods, but that’s still the preferable outcome. It at least leverages the unpaid but not unskilled labor moderators currently put into Reddit into something vaguely tangible–the effective and smooth running of otherwise unwieldy subreddits. Large-scale subreddits that can only function with expansive moderator tools, automod, etc. will potentially suffer noticeably when being operated by new scab mods. That decreased user experience would actually be potentially effective.
It’s also why federation is important. Maybe I’m just old and miss the web 1.0 days, but the current social media landscape is a cancer of enshittification. Kevin Rose killed Digg, Mark Zuckerberg killed Facebook (and Instagram), and Spez is killing Reddit. We need a decentralized internet, even if it’s intuitive at first.
Spot on, federation and decentralization is the right path forward. Users create the content and should own it, the output of our time and typing has value and shouldn’t be siloed away in corporate money making machines run by sociopaths. It should belong to the people to help us connect to each other.
Most of us would not have tried out lemmy and kbin if reddit didn’t implode. It’s a bit rough being so new but it’s promising and content is flowing.
I agree it’s not effective.
But any protest shouldn’t be wild thing that puts everyone involved into dark.
Announcing it and planning it so it sends message but isn’t making everyone life worse than needed, is proper way to do it.
If it’s not effective, just do it again for week/ month / move your subscribers elsewhere / etc … but let everyone involved know an keep it civil. Bad guys will reveal themselves along the way.
In this regard, IMHO those who participated didn’t do it wrong way but those who didn’t listen wronged the community as whole.
Rossman was correct in one of his videos. Community gotta stuck together and not fight each other, that’s the only way to fight those power hungry companies.
I agree decentralized internet is good. Many small competitors are better than one huge mobidick that can’t see it’s own tail anymore so. it rolls over anyone in the way.
Success will be measured in $$$ and that’s loss of ad revenue. So far, no revenue has been lost because all the buys were placed and paid for pre-Blackout.
The acid test is the 2-weeks from the Blackout - will advertisers flee Reddit for more stable/predictable pastures OR will u/spez and company be able to talk them in to staying by offering concessions for the disruptions in audience delivery?
Stay tuned until July 1: u/spez doesn’t seem like a real flexible kinda guy so far but we don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes.
Honestly, part of what makes sites shitty is isn’t just the pursuit of profit over all else, but also the Eternal September. On the internet, quantity follows quality – that is, a high quality discussion board with a small to medium population will come into being, then everyone else will start moving toward it, and as more people show up, it gets more and more toxic, until the quality drops. I’m hoping that the fediverse will to some extent be able to alleviate that by allowing people to split off to some extent without having to leave completely.