I’d love to see Reddit continue to descend into chaos.
Reddit site admins have removed Pics from r/all. It has posts with nearly 5 times the karma of the top posts currently on /all but you can’t see them.
Okay it’s fun, Reddit won’t be able to remove them since a vote was held, but what impact will featuring only pics of John Oliver have on Reddit’s bottom line? This achieves nothing and the pics have already tens of thousands of upvotes, meaning the engagement and traffic are back.
The admins have shown that they are not going to flinch so easily. If mods shut down subreddits then the admins are simply going to reassign the subreddits to more compliant mods and reopen them, and Reddit will resume operation. To casual Redditors, it will appear that the site is ‘back to normal’ and the interruption to their endless-scrolling-dopamine-hit is over.
The r/pics and r/gifs mods see that this is going to be a long game, so they’ve gone for malicious compliance. The message of dissent will continue WITHIN Reddit’s walls, and the awareness campaign will continue.
The final battle will begin at the end of this month when the API is restricted and 3rd-party apps stop working. The awareness campaign will drastically redirect the casual Redditors ’ anger/outrage that their favorite app no longer works from the apps’ creator (“my stupid Apollo app stopped working”) directly to spez.
It appears that spez thinks that Redditors will smoothly switch to the official reddit app… but I think that he drastically underestimates how resistant people are to change of any kind. It will be interesting to watch things unravel. Hopefully, this will be epic, but I suspect that it’ll be more game-of-thrones.
My take is that stuff like this counts on traffic being a flash in the pan. At first, it’s funny and novel, but as time wears on the hope may be that people stop engaging with funny sexy Oliver photo #93848. Hypothetically this would cause a drop in traffic and engagement, but still leave the mod team strictly in compliance with reddit’s demands.
Advertisers don’t just look at traffic numbers when they do buys … anyone with any brains will be looking at content and THIS kind of thing will send them running.
Mods are in revolt. Users have fled the platform. And advertisers don’t like to be associated with nastiness.
u/spez is in bigger and bigger trouble each and every minute this continues. Hence the Brown Shirt tactics…
Well played r/pic and r/gifs mods, well played. This is hilarious.
Man, when this writer’s strike ends i cant wait to see John Oliver talk about this.
the look on his face when the thirst of the comments and post titles sets in.
Man that most evoke all of the emotions. Weirded out, happy, flattered, confused, dumbfounded, …
He posted about it and gave a few pics too on a Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/iamjohnoliver/status/1670179738348933120
