They were not forced, they were pressured. The mods caved to the threat of being replaced, showing everyone that having that little bit of power was always their main priority. I didn’t expect more from dog-walkers.
The general themes on r/antiwork helped me leave a job after being disrespected after asking for a fair raise. That led to switching careers into data science and doubling me salary and doing far more meaningful work. There, I met a colleague, a 45 year old woman, and we were talking about pay equity and our current workplace, and she brought up to ME that she followed antiwork during COVID and how it also helped her realize her self-worth. She’s now moved and found an even better opportunity.
It’s mega cringe a lot of the time, and the value drops off after a month or two of following I’d say, but overall I think it was a force for good. At least in two people’s lives.
Right, but what’s their alternative? While they’re still mods they can still affect some level of change. If they completely cede to Reddit’s admin, they have nothing.
While they’re still mods they can still affect some level of change.
If they can’t endure even a 1 week strike on a social network then they cannot affect any change anyway because they are a completely powerless farce. Imagine how quickly they’d fold if this were a RL thing with actual consequences beyond their moderator position.
I mean have we forgotten when last year the mod of that sub went to a live interview and the whole subreddit was so ashamed they had to distance themselves from it? I think the day later they said nobody will interview anymore and they removed the person as a mod and wiped any trace of it? They are a joke, this is just another event that proves it.
@Whitt oh. no. oh. no. pls. no. no. stop. an adult stepped in and mods put in their place. and the sky is blue. news at 11.
“put in their place”?
To me that has always seemed to talk from people that felt the need to punish people for not pandering to their ego.
If the community wanted it, nothing wrong with the moderators capitulating to the community. Reddit gets the moderation quality they pay for, and they’re paying their moderators negative money, with how things have been going. They can pony up if they want better moderation.
What are they supposed to do, run roughshod all over their users?
If the adult is the wife beater, sure…
There is nothing adult about how reddit is behaving. It’s actually very childish and immature.
Mods are not valued or respected by reddit whatsoever, despite working for free and caring about the quality of the community.
But I’m glad it’s playing out in the open. Reddit will be an even bigger shit platform from now on.
Federation isn’t like email at all. I don’t know why people keep saying that. You’ll never get a message saying “we’re not receiving email from this server today” unless something has gone horribly wrong.
Email also doesn’t hang with a green loading circle for hours when you try to log in.
No, that was pretty much how email worked for a long time. And IRC.
I remember someone even making a song “I am going to ban your domain” to the tune of “they’re coming to take me away” to mock sysadmins who took this drastic measure too quickly.
Some university servers would block all email from abroad except for some whitelisted servers. My school blocked emails from another school because the students were badly policed and would just harrass other schools.
Some domains were universally blockdd because they were used by spammers and scammers.
This mostly softened into spam folders and increasingly sophisticated filtering, which is dominating today.
Email has the same problems as federated lemmy servers.
Mail Servers can end up on distrubuted blacklists and unable to communicate with each other. When office 365 has an outage it causes huge problems because it’s a single large provider having issues. That provider goes down but not email as a whole.
This is the same as what happened about a week ago when lemmy.ml and lemmy.world went down due to load.
I think others are noting how it can be like this. In my experience:
- My kids’ school accounts can only send emails to and receive emails from their teachers’ email addresses. All other emails, including those from fellow students, are blocked.
- I frequently have issues with whitelisted email addresses at work. They sometimes are blocked and I have to go through the tedious whitelisting process all over again.
I’m more seeing it as tiny villages in the same country. Sometimes there’s a duplicate Starbucks over in the other village, but they might have a different daily special. And some villages have beef with eachother, and then you gotta sneak out if you still want to secretly visit your beloved in the other village. Or move over to your summer house in village #3, where you can both meet up without issues.
The utter irony of r/AntiWork being forced to reopen is astounding. Strike broken. Union busted. It’s over.
I wonder why they’re forcing open not particularly advertiser friendly subs like piracy and antiwork?
I wonder if it’s because they know the first few subs to be forced open will make headlines, but the second batch most likely won’t. So by starting with fringe subs it paints the picture that’s it’s not the bigger or more important subs that are participating in the blackout.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see the /r/antiwork mod’s disastrous appearance on Fox News become a talking point again paired with this, so that when people hear “Reddit forces mods to…” that’s the sort of person the public pictures.
Possibly conspiratorial thinking on my part, but the first reason I can think of is that those subs are both popular enough that they wouldn’t want them fully migrating off reddit/closed forever, but also the kind of sub to not go along with unpopular decisions/ cause trouble. If you were looking to force a few subs open to serve as an example to mods of other subs that they must reopen or be replaced, you’d want to choose ones that aren’t as likely to reopen on their own anyway after awhile, and who’s moderation team you might want to replace, as you now have an excuse and the people who would get mad already are.
they are toast, forcing these open will not save them long term. the fact that they had to go here shows how effective this has really been.
no one expect them to close doors tomorrow, and I still think they IPO, lots of dumpster fires IPO. Will still be a dumpster fire and at some point it will be “huh, you still go to that trash site”?
Its happened to ever corp social network.
I think you hit on one of the key points. Every other time this same pattern has played out, each of those sites becomes a shadow of what they once were, but the continue because (to be blunt) running Internet sites is CHEAP.
I like what /r/pics did.
We – the so-called “landed gentry” – appreciate that Reddit is made great by its users. Uncompensated contributors populate the platform’s many communities with their content, just as volunteer moderators keep spam and bigotry at bay. Since neither we nor Reddit would be here without you, it was only fair to let you determine what /r/Pics should include… and you overwhelmingly chose to feature only images of John Oliver looking sexy. (Seriously, the final vote was -2,329 to 37,331.)
As such, /r/Pics will henceforth feature only images of John Oliver looking sexy.
It’s great, have a scroll. No intent to derail, here’s the thread on !reddit@lemmy.ml: https://lemmy.world/post/206467
I wonder if a similar stunt would have been possible for /r/antiwork. Any ideas? How about: “You must rest on weekdays. Posts and comments are only allowed on weekends.”
I hate to be a party pooper, but I really can’t see how the subreddits doing things like that are in any way a protest.
I highly doubt Reddit cares what anyone is posting pictures of as long as they are legal, and the engagement is high. The only way to post them is to engage with Reddit, whether on their website, through the official app, or through a third party app that has to pay Reddit money to use the API. That’s exactly what Reddit wants.
And as for the mods: in a real life scenario, I can see how the threat of being replaced is scary because it means losing your income… but here? They were doing free labour, and as soon as Reddit threatened to take away their power over a corner of the internet, they immediately gave in and proceeded to encourage their audience to “protest” by engaging with Reddit.
I think it would have been several times more effective if the mods just all quit, and everyone who is “protesting” by engaging with Reddit in one form or another (posting, commenting, or just looking and upvoting) just left. I really doubt Reddit is even worried about what is happening now.
I really think the point is that posting useless content that actively protests the platform and makes it less valuable and interesting should make it hard for Reddit to show investors that their platform is worth money as they go public, which is why the whole thing started in the first place.
The lurkers are the ones upvoting. I’m certain that not posting content would be much more boring. What would lurkers do with a drought of content?
To be completely honest, all of these just sound like a lot of excuses for people to toss their alleged ideals and values aside and keep using Reddit, while soothing their conscience by pretending they are still doing something.
And I say “alleged ideals” because if one drops them as soon as they encounter any resistance and it stops being comfortable to stand by them, then I don’t think it can be said they ever stood by those ideals in the first place. With all respect, I would say they were just playing make believe until things got real and actually affected them. And the sad part is that it affected them in the most minute of ways.
Perhaps I’m being too dramatic, but it makes me wonder: if people can’t even organize and keep a strike for one week when it requires this little of them, and a lot are succumbing to the smallest of threats (“you will henceforth no longer be allowed to perform free labour for us”), then what’s the point in even trying to organize and change anything in the real world?
imo the novelty of john oliver will wear off soon, and people will want regular content again. so long as mods stay firm that regular content is not allowed, users will be dissatisfied and lower their engagement. though it’s not a perfect plan (people could just use different subs), it’s better than nothing
That’s brilliant, hope to see Reddit turn into nothing but a slew of super-specific protest posts.
I want /r/ music to ban all music except covers of ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ or maybe ‘My Heart Will Go On’.
You’ll love what r/steam did. They were forced open and from what I hear users are now exclusively posting pictures of water vapor.
I like your idea, but also combine it with the idea behind CatsStandingUp, but each post must be the exact same image, with the exact same title. Make it as boring as possible.
To add extra spice: Everyone who posts or comments gets automatically banned by automod, as participation is working and against community ideals. I have no idea if that breaks any site rules, but it would discourage participation.
