Reddit CEO Tells Employees That Subreddit Blackout 'Will Pass' (theverge.com) 299
In an internal memo sent Monday afternoon to Reddit staff, CEO Steve Huffman addressed the recent blowback directed at the company, telling employees to block out the "noise" and that the ongoing blackout of thousands of subreddits will eventually pass. From a report: The memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Verge, is in response to popular subreddits going dark this week in protest of the company's increased API pricing for third-party apps. Some of the most popular Reddit clients say the bill for keeping their apps up and running could cost them millions of dollars a year. More than 8,000 Reddit communities have gone dark in protest, and while many plan to open up again on Wednesday, some have said they'll stay private indefinitely until Reddit makes changes.
Huffman says the blackout hasn't had "significant revenue impact" and that the company anticipates that many of the subreddits will come back online by Wednesday. "There's a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we've seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well," the memo reads. "We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail."
Huffman says the blackout hasn't had "significant revenue impact" and that the company anticipates that many of the subreddits will come back online by Wednesday. "There's a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we've seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well," the memo reads. "We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail."
now that he said that... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:now that he said that... (Score:5, Informative)
Good question. But something not so different happened in the past. A bunch of people angry over reddit’s policies and content started a new uncensored site called voat.co
You’ll notice it didn’t last long. Head over to archive.org and look at the final few weeks. It’s a bit difficult to attract advertisers when half the posts on the front page were just complaints about how the jews and n******* were ruining these people’s already terrible lives.
Re:now that he said that... (Score:4, Interesting)
Right now the Fediverse nerds are trying to get ActivityPub applications and platforms using Mastodon and Lemmy, but its going to be some time before those start looking good.
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> It’s a bit difficult to attract advertisers when half the posts on the front page were just complaints about how the jews and n******* were ruining these people’s already terrible lives.
I hate it when die hard Redditors go brigading into other sites too.
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Voat comparison is not quite right.
Voat began as a way to deal with more than just censorship on reddit. It was a way to deal with reddit's power moderator problem, and reddit's approach of hiding vote counts (when reddit was new you could see a +400 -100 = +300 type of math, eventually it would just show the +300, and if something was +100 -1600 = -1500 it would just show 0). So while there were people bitching about crazy things, they were a minority, just as they were on reddit.
Once reddit began bannin
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Yes but the opposite is kind of the problem here.
One of the major complaints is that this API policy basically prices out bots, which a lot of mods use to keep that kind of stuff off the bits they moderate. Without the help of good moderation bots, the choice is a ton more unpaid human effort (ain't happening), spam of various sorts including the kind that doesn't like the Jews or shutting down.
Re: now that he said that... (Score:5, Insightful)
voat was specifically for people of that stripe,
According to Reddit and its mainstream corporate allies.
It's impossible to compete when the oligopoly you're competing with can simply declare you and everyone who even looks at your site are nazis and deplorables, get you removed from hosting, delisted by google, blocked by payment processors, and banned from infrastructure backbones like AWS.
Re: now that he said that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, bud, but "normal people," which is to say the majority of Americans, support people living however they please. We are not authoritarian by nature, quite the contrary. We believe in individual rights to self expression, and if you don't, I kindly suggest it you may not be a real American.
As for left wing narratives, the majority of voters in both parties favor economic policies to the left of what we have now. Medicare is left wing socialism, and the most popular government program ever made. That's why people like you want to get rid of it, not because it doesn't work. You want to get rid of it because it does work, and people know it. Kinda plays hell with your "no government is good government" propaganda.
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I think in 10 years at the rate of expenditure growth vs GDP is that all the taxes combined won't exceed the interest alone.
Given what happens at that point, would you still say it's working? The biggest expense in the US in mandatory algorithmic spending. Support programs, medicare stuff, anything that just increases without anyone deciding the budget just based on the number of the people in the country.
Senators have been presenting this problem. Anyway until you revert to slavery you're not going to be a
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We need to raise taxes on the rich back to what they were in the good old days Republicans pine for. Marginal tax rate of 90%. "Oh!" you whine, "Nobody paid that!" Yes, but they paid more than they do now and that's the point. Raise taxes on capital gains, raise corporate taxes, lower taxes for the middle class and boom! Deficit fixed.
Normal people are not lazy, they just don't want to be taken advantage of. The real drag on our economy is billionaires and other tax cheats.
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So medicare collapse is like fusion? By that I mean it's been 10 years away for 30 years or so. Yet, somehow the deficit increases most when the GOP is in charge. So if the deficit is your primary concern I would suggest voting for anything but the GOP.
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So let's look at the two 30,000 foot level fixes:
1. cut spending
2. raise revenue to cover spending without expanding debt
What is the problem with raising taxes so that the people with the most means to help pay for a functioning society, actually pay more taxes than some of the people with the least means? Why do people that make millions of dollars a year pay less in taxes than grade school teachers and firefighters?
We fix that, and we don't have to do nearly as much of #1. There's still cutting that nee
Re: now that he said that... (Score:5, Insightful)
We don't have a left wing in US politics. We have a center right party, and a far right party. Neoliberals want everything Reagan wanted, they are not left wing. And they are very authoritarian.
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This is the first true political statement I have read on Slashdot comments in years.
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No, people want to pay for things with their taxes. The are not, in fact, idiots. They don't want predatory capitalists taking a cut, and figure, correctly, that government is more trustworthy than a man with a profit motive and no morals.
People recognize that certain endeavors are just not well served by a capitalist free market. Health care is a primary one that simply doesn't work unless heavily regulated or run by the government. You do not know what is wrong with you. You do not know how to fix it. You
Re: now that he said that... (Score:5, Informative)
The nazis are outside Disney now shilling for DeSantis. I’m not even joking here. Literal nazis flying swastikas. https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]
We fought a war against these people.
Re: now that he said that... (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you really think our modern-day nationalists (Trump, DeSantis, Jim Jordan, Gregg Abbott, etc.) give one whit about what we did, who we fought, and why, 80 years ago?
All they care about is being in power and control of others. Sounds a lot like totalitarianism / fascism to me.
I don't agree with all of the varied lifestyles that the left has.... not my cup of tea - but going to let them be simply because they aren't causing me any harm. The guy (at least I think a 'he') with 237 piercings, tat's, purple hair, etc. is polite to me when I check out at Walmart or Target, does a blood draw at the Dr. office, or comes to fix my A/C. To me, that is infinitely more important than a rude a-hole with clean-cut hair and dresses nice.
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I don't agree with all of the varied lifestyles that the left has.... not my cup of tea - but going to let them be simply because they aren't causing me any harm. The guy (at least I think a 'he') with 237 piercings, tat's, purple hair, etc. is polite to me when I check out at Walmart or Target, does a blood draw at the Dr. office, or comes to fix my A/C. To me, that is infinitely more important than a rude a-hole with clean-cut hair and dresses nice.
I mean that's mostly good but why do you "not agree" with
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Congratulations you made it to adulthood. What about all the current children. Isn't the leftist mantra: "Think of the children".
"Think of the children" is what intolerant people pretending to be adults scream out while still sending their own kids to Christian institutions [theconversation.com] (catholic schools/churches) without any hint of the irony.
Re: now that he said that... (Score:5, Informative)
No, that's pretty much always been the calling of the right, when it comes to banning books, stifling sex education, drug education, instituting puritanical horseshit, eliminating needle exchanges that reduce the spread of disease, eliminating condom distribution that reduces teen pregnancy, etc.
But, oddly, not when it comes to re-enabling child labor or reducing the age of consent for marriage to very-not-adult ages.
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Given that DeSantis hates Nazis and is willing to sign unconstitutional laws to be able to arrest them for distributing flyers, what's the real story behind that thing you linked? Which actual group is that? Is the DeSantis sign unironic, or is it like when the klan endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016, done because they know they have a toxic brand? Or is it a straight false flag like when a bunch of liberals dressed up like fascists as part of protesting some Republican or other, and some reporting dropped
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Even if he says he "hates Nazis", his policies still attract Nazis. It's no secret that Nazis support the right wing ideology.
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Feds.
Re: now that he said that... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: now that he said that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, technically, so did the Nazis in Germany. At least until they got elected.
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Yup, that's pretty much what it is.
It's what people want. Getting their stereotypes and preconceived positions supported and reaffirmed so they can feel like they are right, no matter what completely harebrained insanity they think is true. There will almost certainly be some other loonies sharing their delusions.
Personally, I think Reddit is at least partly responsible for the rampart insanity we face today, where people believe the most bizarre and completely insane things. Before Reddit and the likes, it
Normal people are left wing (Score:2, Interesting)
Conservative/Liberal and Right/Left are different things. Right wing extremists, aware that their policies are both unpopular and have been repeatedly shown to be failures (trickle down economics anyone) branded themselves "Conservative" so that folks would think of them as the "safe" option.
But if you dig into polls, folks generally support universal healthcare, giving homes to the homeless & food to the hungry, civil rights over hi
Re: now that he said that... (Score:4, Insightful)
You mad you can't?
Re: now that he said that... (Score:4, Insightful)
The question of transgendered athletes in sex-differentiated violent contact sports is a tricky one. What it really illustrates though is that the system of gender-differentiated sports is broken in the first place. I'm not really familiar with the athlete you mentioned, but it's pretty clear from context you're talking about a transgender fighter in some sort of fighting sport (boxing, MMA, kickboxing, whatever). The thing is, those sports have always had various classes that you do and do not pit against each other. Traditionally you do it by weight. That does not work that well between men and women because weight and muscle distribution do seem to be different. Maybe the best solution would be a system that better matches fighters based on classes that make more sense, and drop the sex-based classes altogether.
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Nobody wants uncensored social media except, well, the RWNJs and Nazis who want to recruit on social media.
You can say that but everyone can see which side wants censoring, and it's usually to censor facts, video footage of what they said etc, and they want to hide it. People aren't falling for it anymore.
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It is pretty obvious that the right wing is banning books and free speech. That's what you mean, right? The actual government telling you what you can and can't read, and what you can and can't wear.
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P.S You disgust normal americans, you think you're the norm, you're not, and there's a special place for people like you, it's called protective custody.
Also I'm not American.
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You don't know shit then. Stop talking like you know America if you aren't from here, asshole.
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You assholes have no problem with kids reading those same types of sex scenes if it's straight. Just ask Beverly Cleary. Most YA novels have sex scenes. Doesn't make them pornographic or unsuitable for kids.
You aren't American so stop talking as if you know us or our culture, asshole.
Re:This is different (Score:5, Insightful)
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The only solution that would prevent this from happening, is a federated system of message boards. But this requires effort and costs for hosting a message board. Mastadon for example, after it's bit of a peak during the chaos at Twitter, is not really growing. Because it's not nearly as efffortless as Facebook or Twitter.
And hosting something at the scale of Reddit is expensive so they must make money some how, and their primary source of revenue is advertising because the alternative is to charge a subscr
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Re:now that he said that... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:now that he said that... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Unless you use third party apps, such as moderators, or anyone that tries to use reddit on mobile.
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On my phone browser I use desktop mode for almost everything including Slashdot and reddit.
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It seems like the big issue is that the third party API was used by tools that the moderators relied on. Hence the CEO's comment about new moderator tools.
If it wasn't for that, I suspect the protest would have been a lot smaller.
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/06/13/1742238/reddit-ceo-tells-employees-that-subreddit-blackout-will-pass#
Re:now that he said that... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: now that he said that... (Score:2)
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However, the only people who are "unhappy" are developers who make 3rd party apps. The API price increase has ZERO effect on 99.9999999% of the people who use Reddit.
Like most social sites, Reddit likely follows the 90-9-1 rule: 90% lurk, 9% participate, 1% are your power users. The problem is that the API increase disproportionately affects the 1% that are your moderators and largest contributors.
And on the question of support, several of the larger subreddits held surveys to gauge support. From what I heard secondhand, all of the ones that held surveys landed in the 70-90+% range for supporting going dark.
Slashdot vs Reddit (Score:2)
Came to Slashdot this week after a multi-year pause thanks to the Reddit blackout. Silver lining.
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Same, the Firehose however is more like a garden hose these days..
Looked at my history and it had almost been exactly 10 years since I had posted on here.
Forgot you couldn't edit or delete comments.. Need to be more mindful of my typos LOL.
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Me too, but many of the posts in this thread remind me of why I left.
I logged out sunday. (Score:3)
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Currently trying to break the muscle memory of hitting ctrl-t immediately followed by just moving the fingers down over r-e-d and clicking the first link in the dropdown. It's getting better.
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I installed a browser plugin.. Too many google search results send you to reddit.
There are A LOT of subs on reddit, some of them are VERY good for technical Q&A..
What a tool (Score:5, Interesting)
He is an absolute tool and blind to what he is doing. My youtube traffic coming from reddit has basically dropped to zero. I clearly see the lack of audience from my metrics, and I am not anything beyond a small time few hundred view gig. Must be glaringly obvious to larger shops.
This guy is going to ruin either reddit or his career. Hopefully just his career.
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Re: What a tool (Score:2)
Not blind, he is greedy and clearly gambling.
If he is right, he has solidified his control over the site and its remaining users and he gets fabulously rich in the IPO.
If he is indeed wrong, he will blame whatever else and try to continue to get fabulously rich in the IPO.
And worst case if they fire him, he takes his golden parachute and profits off of the then continued success of the site through his accumulated shares, and gets only semi fabulously rich, and has a story to tell how amazing daring and man
Re:What a tool (Score:4, Interesting)
He's likely correct though.
Even going in, like 90+% of the subreddits said, upfront, they will do it for two days and then back to normal.
I don't know what the subreddits thought would happen if they explicitly declared merely a two-day blackout as a response to something that reddit had not yet budged on.
The message was loud and clear: We are pissed about the changes, but we can only spend two days before we will cave and go back to giving you free content and moderating labor.
So reddit sees third-party clients go away they didn't want to have anyway, most of the "important" subreddits explicitly declared an end to their protest, so the only point of unknown consequences is whether the third party app shutdowns *actually* decrease user engagement or not.
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This guy is going to ruin either reddit or his career.
He's probably right, though. I've been on the Web long enough to have witnessed the pattern over and over again:
1) A site does something that people don't like.
2) People get into an uproar and threaten to abandon the offending site.
3) Time passes.
4) People keep using the offending site like nothing happens.
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Re: Huh.. (Score:2)
Very, very different situations (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody is telling all of America to hate reddit. There's no 24/7 news network doing that much less YouTube channels with millions of subs (real or not).
What's more, Budlite's core demographic was a prefect target for that brand of outrage. Boomers and Gen X drink the stuff. Mention it to a Millennial or Gen Z and their response will be "that stuff my grandpa drinks? ew.".
A better example would be Target, who ignored the complaints until the threats of violence spooked them. Then they took one guys pride stuff off their shelves & moved some of the rainbows to the back as a token gesture to calm things down.
Reddit can and will do much the same. They'll make a few token gestures and wait for it to blow over. Without a noise machine telling their core demographic to be angry 24/7 it probably will too.
What might kill them is unpaid mods jumping ship. Not because they're upset, but because Reddit's own mod tools are by all accounts terrible and the mods all use 3rd party apps for just that reason.
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If reddit wants to stay active and enforce this they only need to usurp mod power from the big subs that have decided to close down.
It's the next iteration of reddit. Big subs will be controlled by the big interests, and I suspect most of them already are behind the scenes anyway.
Enshitification (Score:5, Insightful)
Corpos want unlimited money. They don't want to make some of the money, they want to make *all* of the money.
Making a good product that people like can be profitable, but not enough for an IPO and the stock holders that come after.
The guy who coined the term covers the process. It's the same one every time. Hook people with a good service, open APIs and unubstrusive adverts. Use that to get everyone locked into their communities. Then turn the screws.
It's a process, and it's well understood at this point. The expense and difficulty of running a modern website (e.g. dealing with trolls, pedos, EU privacy law, copyright law, DDOS attacks, literal state actors spreading propaganda on your site, etc, etc) means you need a lot more time and money than a hobbyist has. So it's easy for a site to get it's hooks in initially and move onto the other steps.
There's lots of other places I see these kind of MBA derived patterns. The cycle of mass layoffs to keep unemployment high enough to weaken labor is a good one. Leveraged Buyouts are another. I'm sure plenty can come up with more.
When folks use the term "systemic" this is what it means. And there's a reason why you see so many people telling you that nothing is "systemic".
Like George Carlin said, "It's a big club and you ain't in it".
Re:Enshitification (Score:5, Insightful)
If you aren't paying for it, you're not the customer.
If you want a say in how a product is developed, you have to be willing to pay for it.
People aren't. It's that simple.
It shouldn't be at all surprising that companies optimize for the people who pay the bills, and right now, that's advertisers. If you want to change that, you have to be willing to pay for things you use.
Not entirely true (Score:2, Informative)
The question is will the unpaid mods leave. Reddit doesn't have a company without those.
If the mods leave the site goes to hell fast. Spam, racism, pedos. All the stuff Twitter is dealing with right now since they fired all their mods. That sends the advertisers running (except the really dodgy ones and they don't have deep enough pockets).
Yes, you are the product, but you still have to be a product worth buying.
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Ok so where is the paid alternative to Reddit that I can use?
That's not how it works typically. You don't get to be mad at a company who is charging for access by finding a competitor that has what you want and punish the original company for their 'foolishness' while still paying for it, just for your pound of spite.
The closet compromise I see happening is Reddit allowing users to generate their own API to use a program and charging for that use, and you better believe there will be a pricing difference between a few queries to bulk queries, you're going to pay more
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Reddit itself has a paid tier - Reddit Premium. $40/year gets you reading without ads (and coins every month for awards, which I don't use - anyone interested in 40K+ Reddit coins?).
Reddit isn't making anything off me except for my $40/year, and whatever pathetic traffic my posts generate.
Every time I browse Reddit without logging in, I immediately notice the ads, ads, ADS.
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They've been planning to IPO for a couple years (Score:2)
now and are supposed to this year. This is going to tank their valuation. I bet they have some angry insiders right now.
Of course it will? (Score:2)
It was primarily designated as a 48-hour blackout, so of course it will pass - after 48 hours.
the blackout hasn't had "significant revenue impact"
Yeah, they have a policy of a minimum spend of $5 per day for an ad campaign. So even if you get no clicks, they still get their $5 per campaign. They have a lot of small advertisers.
Of course, they could be determining "impact" over the course of a whole year...
Flight will be real. (Score:2)
Let's face it. If whatever revenue is involved isn't greater than the costs now being incurred, those folks aren't coming back. Period. I don't care. Reddit is only useful to me for when I want to know if a celebrity "has nudes". It can fold for all I care. But some people (ill-advised or not) have stakes in reddit communities that matter. I feel for them.
pissed users are like constipation? (Score:2)
So, pissed off users are like constipation? In a couple of days you'll have a hard poop and feel better?
There have been Subreddit Blackouts before (Score:2)
If it doesn't ... (Score:2)
Waiting for "If it doesn't we'll just select new moderators"
The return of /. ? (Score:4)
As for the blackout/boycott, I haven't opened Apollo since Sunday evening and on my computers, I removed my 'bookmark' just to avoid the temptation. I kinda want to see what it looks like but don't want to contribute any clicks or visits either so I do my part in showing the impact.
Re: The return of /. ? (Score:2)
I see old people
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slashdot isn't even in the running to try to compete really.
A key part is to have multiple communities that function independently, but can merge together as your interests overlap multiple communities.
slashdot is pretty much like a single subreddit. Closest they come is having 7 fixed "topics". A monolithic media site.
Now of course this might not be a bad recipe. Multiple independently owned and operated sites, with identity management from identity providers (Google, Facebook, etc) and option to aggrega
Before it was cool (Score:2)
I wasn't on Reddit before not being on Reddit was cool!
He's in real trouble now (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:History repeats: Nero Fiddles, R/ Burns. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Because instead of charging 2x their cost per use (which would be about 0.001 cents), they are charging many times their cost. Their price is so high, it's clear that the intent is to kill 3rd party aps, not monetize them.
Re:History repeats: Nero Fiddles, R/ Burns. (Score:4, Insightful)
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They're not going to be held hostage by moderators. Just like employees think they'll hold the company hostage, and always have shocked pikachu face when they company just replaces them.
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Reddit is allowing this to take place. Just keep reminding yourself of that. They don't share your concerns so you should probably re-evaluate them.
Re: Why can’t Reddit “unprivate” (Score:4)
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No I mean you can't expect swift results That's like an employee walkout at a walmart or something. It's not being held hostage. They are being momentarily disruptive, sure, but they're not going to hold them hostage. E.G It will end, Reddit will end it, and they will get shocked pikachu faces.
They can, and will be replaced as many employees thought before, "No! I have them this time! I can force them to do it!" and then no, shock pikachu.
So yes to disruption, inconvenient, some Chaos while they replace mod
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Part of the anger is that Reddit announced that most moderator tools were being shut out with effectively zero notice, didn't even realize they were saying that, and then lied about it. So if these experienced mods who know how to use what tools Reddit has go and their actual tools
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Yeah I'm not actually on the side of reddit or anything. I can absolutely understand why people are angry and how they feel, and the frustration about a lack of moderator tools among other things, but people gaslight too. "It's about the tool" and not about the money they were making or something you know. I'm not trying to prove a specific thing with that statement either.
I'm just saying the way they're going about it, and the thought of what Reddit can and cannot do is likely to end in surprised pikachu f
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Lots actually, people get delusional pretty easily, or find it's the only power and status they can reasonably grab is by working for free or other things. Will that happen? Who knows, happens a lot tho
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Well, for some weak definition of the word 'hostage'.
That *might* carry some weight if they all said "our subreddits are private indefinitely pending a better result", but instead they said "48 hours and back to normal". So reddit shrugs, takes a couple of days of a hit, get reminded of what they already knew: They are screwed without the communities, but the communities are so hooked on reddit they won't walk away in real terms.
So when my reader app goes away, I probably won't bother visiting it so much,
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I'm sure you've read that the mods are volunteers and if they banned the mods the site would spiral further into chaos while they found new mods or worse yet, jump on the AI bandwagon. Anyway. It won't happen, it would be the nail in the coffin.
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