Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible

whoosierdaddy@lemmy.world to Reddit@lemmy.world – 198 points –
Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible
theverge.com
27

Not like the privating protests ever had much in the way of teeth anyway. The overwhelming majority of mods weren't willing to actually leave, so it was just puffery. Any mod who was on reddit during the API protests and is still there has proven they will cave to whatever rules reddit throws at them.

This is the stupid part. I left and didn't go back. I still end up there searching the odd problem online, but I don't necessarily need it. The one sub I modded, when I was last checking, has had quite a bit of spam and self-promotion "watch my new YouTube video" shit going on. I wasn't the only one doing anything on the team, as it was like 30k+ members, but it was alow traffic sub. But they don't do the weekly discussion threads, the repost bots were rampant.

All to make more money. I don't know why people stayed. All that huffing and puffing, just to cower and fold.

Privating protests definitely had some teeth in the short term, but not in the long term. In the short term, it targeted what Reddit and other social media sites value most: user retention. By privating subreddits, people would be denied access to the content they want (while being served ads), so they'd click off the website. That's why it's gone now. It's sad people are still volunteering their time for the profit of investors. I would, though, argue that privating subreddits was one of the most effective online protestings of recent history

Privating protests definitely had some teeth in the short term, but not in the long term

Toothless.

Effective how? Reddit went through with everything they had planned. It could have been an effective form of protesting if more mods had actually been willing to leave the site or at least their modding job for good.

mods had actually been willing to leave the site or at least their modding job for good.

A lot of mods left. You can definitely see the quality of moderation dropping

Ok granted, that may be true. I wouldn't be able to tell as I left in June '23 and never looked back. But from what I read about the protests back then, I seem to remember that only few subs had to have their mod team replaced by Reddit. I think if more mod teams of big subs had been willing to call it quits as a team, the disruption could have been bigger.

In the end though, I don't know if any form of protest can be effective in this kind of situation as Reddit holds all the cards, and if they are dead set on enshittifying, nothing will stop them. What mods and users should do is just walk out.

What mods and users should do is just walk out.

Indeed

It's spez and his board's site now, and they're making that very clear. It's kind of sad that everyone keeps contributing their time for free to a company that hates them.

"Protest is still allowed... If we approve it."

Peaceful protest, non peaceful or non legal protest is allowed only on the merit people decide to do it, regardless of what kind of mind games they try and use to stop it. If this happened once, it can happen again, just in different ways.

Sh.itjustworks deleted my comments so I'm reposting them.

It also publicly noted that going NSFW (Not Safe For Work), a tool moderators used to add friction to accessing a subreddit and to make the subreddit ineligible for advertising, was โ€œnot acceptable.โ€

Easy solution here, post NSFW content in every sub ๐Ÿ‘

Well duh, it hits their bottom line now when mods black-out major subs in protest.

But yall already know that...

As I mentioned in another thread, about the same link, whoever is left moderating that shithole lacks dignity and care about the userbase to do anything.

Their is one site-wide protest they can all implementโ€ฆ

Exactly, they've only decided to cut off peaceful and legal protest, they don't get a say though in non-legal or non-peaceful protests, especially involving cyber attacks against them.

reposted because SJW (fitting name) deleted all my old ones.

So the form of protest will be deranged shit posting and flooding the subreddits instead because mods will just let it happen. Will be good for the quality.

I'd say that's a kinda a stretch, peaceful protests maybe, but peaceful and legal protests aren't the only type of protest as anyone who knows their history would be aware of. Violent and illegal protests are very much still possible even under this change, and they can very much hurt Reddit depending on how far they go.

Events like this could be considered a type of protest in the future, and while this one didn't do very much damage, ones which are more extreme very well could.

This shouldn't be surprising, do cyber companies think they are immune to the nasty kind of protest just because they can put artificial limits on the peaceful kind? Violent protest has happened all through history, it will no doubt continue into the cyber age, and it may get a whole lot uglier than just a few broken windows or a few cuts and scrapes.

Letโ€™s tell people on the reddit posts discussing this to switch to Lemmy.

I quickly had a look on /r/modnews, nobody mentioned any alternative of any kind.

Maybe those mentions get shadow banned

Thatโ€™s suspicious though I didnโ€™t know you could get shadow banned on there.

You definitely can, I got shadowbanned when I talked about Lemmy on some subs, now I mostly post about /r/Redditalternatives