The best protest is to stop moderating. Lie flat. Let the subreddit go to shit.
That’s when I knew we lost. When power hungry moderators felt threatened and, instead of standing in solidarity with its users, caved to corporate demands.
“But we’ll be able to still protest. Every Tuesday.”
Hell are those protests still going on? I highly doubt it.
People tried that.
reddit corporate will remove those mods and ask which other mods want to be super duper awesome and be able to say they moderate another N thousand users per day for zero pay. And people leap at that.
Until the users leave, nothing will happen. In a fucked way, reddit corporate are doing everyone a favor by removing the spineless “We are going to go silent for 24 hours with no real demands or bargaining power” idiocy.
At least you’re not the sucker doing it for free for the shareholders anymore.
I mean… everyone contributing all those super useful posts that everyone thinks are the only authoritative sources of information on the internet are doing exactly that.
Every time you provide some tech support or a bit of advice? You are providing reddit shareholders’ money.
Many subs did that, so reddit substituted the mods for others that do as they are told.
The dndmemes protests were a pretty incredible thing while they lasted. The mods changed the subreddit to “nsfw” because that disabled most of the monetization. Then Reddit admins told them the subreddit obviously wasn’t really nsfw and to change it to accurately reflect the subreddit content.
…so the mods changed the subreddit rules to allow actual nsfw content and people went nuts. In multiple senses of the term.
Of course “accurately reflecting the subreddit” wasn’t what Reddit really cared about. They wanted to preserve the advertising stream for a popular subreddit, and this did the opposite of that. Reddit admins soon after basically said “remove nsfw content, restore the subreddit to what it used to be, do what we say or we’ll replace you with a mod team of our own choosing”.
The problem is that this opens the door to far right bootlickers who a salivating at the idea of turning reddit into an even farther right shithole.
Reddit would close the sub for being unmoderated until someone asks to be the new mod
mission accomplished? That has the same effect as making it private, doesn’t it?
