I think a lot of moderators are just going to back down and return to business-as-usual from tomorrow. Reddit will suffer as a business but this isn’t going to downright kill the site. Unlike say… Tumblr or OnlyFans, Reddit has a far more diverse clientele and many of them couldn’t give a shit about third-party apps.
These half-arsed protests staged after the 14th June have told me that most of Reddit’s mods are fucking cowards who are more afraid of losing their status as internet janitors than all the third-party apps.
Reddit’s moderators could have easily brought the site to its knees if they just collectively stopped enforcing rules (including site-wide ones), removed Automoderator, unbanned everybody, then told the community to just go nuts.
The mods of /r/interestingasfuck had the right idea by encouraging users to post NSFW content, since this would have chased away advertisers in droves.
I mean the whole “sexy pics of John Oliver” protest that /r/pics had isn’t going to chase away advertisers and was something that Spez could easily ignore, but having your content displayed alongside a flood of explicit pornographic images definitely will.
I’d argue it will become like Facebook, with the younger and more intelligent crowd leaving the site.
I’m on the older side, can’t comment anything about the intelligent part.
Visiting Reddit now just feels like watching teenagers raging against bots. Like YouTube on steroids. You can’t convince me anyone there is older than, being generous, 25.
Older-than-me-people (50+) are still playing Candy Crutch on Facebook.
I’d argue that you’re right, and that it has already happened. If the bootlicking crowd on Reddit is actually organic users hearing a call to action to start commenting after months and years of inactivity, that is. Reddit is known to operate large networks of sock puppet accounts for fake engagement and narrative control (per Venture Beat’s reporting, which quotes an admission from Huffman).
Plausible. With only a fraction of Reddit’s supposed size, Lenny+kbin are already nearing parity in quality of discourse.
It was actually the olds that left first, the ones who remember what the internet was like before corporations came in and dominated everything.
The front page has gotten worse and worse over the last few weeks. Posts are just filled with Top Level spam comments with no replies. There has to be some kind of coordinated effort by the admins to make it look like the site is still doing fine.
The protest wasn’t successful, but it’s made enough people think twice about their reddit usage that it did something. I think a lot of the mods thought thought that reddit would cave, and now they haven’t they’re facing the destruction of what many of them have built from next to nothing (Mostly mid size subreddits) they’re not prepared to nuke it all.
Why would they continue work on a site where in reality they have zero control.
Up until now, they probably thought they had, but now it’s clear they don’t.
It now turns out, that mods can be overruled and even excluded from the community they started, for little to no reason.
I agree the mods could and should have done a lot more to protest more effectively as you said. Reddit will be around for a long time to come I suspect, but in a steadily decreasing manner, with its effectiveness and relevance as an (often good) information source fading away.
The mods would need to have some actual conviction instead of being selfish losers for this to happen.
All they care about is their own modding, tools, power, etc
As soon as it looked like they might lose their mod powers they caved.
that’s pretty embarrassing. they should’ve opened the flood gates and walked away. i modded a /r/technology for a minute and there was just so much backroom bickering about moderation philosophy applied to every borderline spam case. idk why anyone would want to engage in that constantly.
You’re obviously too good of a person to have continued to be a mod
It would be nice if mods where the type of people who didn’t want to be mods.
