I think this is the death knoll for the protest unfortunately. Shitposting hurts the user experience, but it doesn’t really hurt reddit. In a week or two the casual users will revolt against the protests and the mods will feel like they have lost popular support and cave.
Hopefully enough people have fully left the platform to cause reddit some pain. But honestly I think reddit would rather have a smaller easier to manipulate user base of new users rather than keeping all the oldest and most cynical users.
I think the action should be coordinated with a migration to lemmy, every user who complains about the lack of quality content you forward (via comments) to the counterpart here
Yep. If no alternative is put forward then nothing will change.
It’s burning the barn down. Sure, new subs will happen, but they will be harder to find, and they need to re-establish the rules. It also makes monetization hard. All those ads sold against specific subs are worthless. And now reddit doesn’t know what subs it can sell ads against. Basically they can only sell ads generally to the entire site. This hits Reddit in the wallet. Also, it mucks up selling the data to AI companies.
Long term, I think you are correct. But short term reddit is trying to IPO. This whole protest will devalue any IPO and cause investors to think twice.
I think it’s obvious that Reddit will remove the mods if shit posting continues.
I also think it’s obvious this isn’t the quick fix people keep pretending it is.
Pick a totally new user? Might be a shitty mod and not able to handle the shitposting anyway.
Pick an existing mod that’s willing to play ball? That’s what they did with /r/piracy, which is now John Oliver themed anyway.
It does hurt Reddit, the user experience is what keeps people browsing it. If the user experience deteriorates, so does engagement.
But right now it’s bringing eyeballs to see the spectacle. To be effective these need to persist long past the point where it isn’t “fun” anymore.
Spez likely is looking at this and seeing:
- He can make mods jump by threatening to move ownership of the subreddit
- Numbers are up as people engage with this fad
- Once users tire of this he can trot out the same threats and take over the subreddits anyway
Edit: just to make it clear I’m not saying I think this is fine for Reddit long term. I’ve just had this conversation with too many MBAs to not know this is how they’d look at all of this.
I suppose the only caveat to that is the fact that mods are unpaid volunteers, if they all downed tools it would take both time and costly resource to replace them which would hurt the bottom line when theyve been reliant on unpaid labour for so long.
All mods had to do was collectively say they are no longer going to moderate. Let’s see how quickly reddit admins cave when they need to pay moderators or have the site filled with stuff even 4chan doesn’t allow.
Exactly this, don’t make them dark, leave the unpaid work and let it rot
