Why exactly would it be crazy? A few mods taking a community of half a billion hostages is not crazy?
If I were spez I would simply disable the ability to make new subreddits private.
This protest is not for the greater good, it's harming half a billion users for the benefit (actually, for no benefit since nothing will come out of it) of the 3% that want to not see ads and use the 3rd party apps.
Running a subreddit is an alternative to running your own forum. An alternative thats much easier to get up and running, so it's a very popular one.
If Reddit does a mass replacement of mods, the illusion is broken. You're not running your own forum, you're doing free work for some website. So if you want to create a place to discuss X, then you dont think to make a subreddit for X, you go with something you actually control or far more likely just somewhere the illusion hasn't been broken; like create a discord server.
That illusion is what has made Reddit basically the forum. It's the whole value of the site. Destroying the thing that makes your site valuable is crazy.
How many times do you get a Discord server in your Google results when searching for something?
Reddit's value proposition is not the ego stroking of the 0.0000001% that are moderators, it's the discoverability and interoperability between unrelated niches.
If little dictators don't get their kick from rulling lawlessly on a community anymore, I say good ridance.
Ego stroking of some mods is far from what is happening.. please get the full picture. Those unpaid mods that did work for Reddit for free get their tools taken away they need to do this unpaid work reasonably, while at the same time Reddit starts price gouging 3rd party apps to extract more value for their IPO - Reddit wouldn't be there where it is today if it wouldn't have all the free content of the users and free work of the mods.
Kind of ridiculous, but I mean how Reddit is acting, they can just remove those unpaid moderators, replace them with paid ones and restore everything back to normal: If that is your's and also Reddit's view, where is the problem then?
Only 3% of moderation actions come from from third-party apps [1]. What was that again about taking away the tools the moderators are using?
This whole thing about third-party apps has been ridiculously mismanaged by the communities.
The only 2 reasons people want to keep third-party apps are 1) they prefer them to the official one, 2) they don't want ads. Both of those reasons are valid, but neither are even remotely close to justifying the actions that those Reddit nerds are taking.
The communities are what made the Reddit results so relevant.
I get not being sympathetic with petty kings of message boards, but let’s be real, Reddit is an awful company whose incompetence is legendary. They’ve failed to monetize, failed to maintain the user experience and now are failing to keep a vital aspect of their business going.
Ultimately their failure is a good thing. Reddit broke the internet by ending the phpbb era. Time for the next thing.
> >How many times do you get a Discord server in your Google results when searching for something?
> What does this have to do with what I wrote?
You are suggesting that those users will go away from Reddit to form separate dedicated communities, and I am saying that they will try but fail to attract people.
Reddit allows the vast majority of the subs that participate in the blackout to survive simply because they are a part of Reddit and benefit from its infrastructure and features.
You really think a website dedicated to cute animals will attract 34M subscribers like /r/aww? And another one with the exact same theme will attract 4M subscribers (with a lot of overlap) like /r/Eyebleach?
Those communities exist and strive because the barrier to entry is literally non-existent. It takes one input to create them and one click to join them.
> Odd because I get the impression you prefer the communities those little dictators create to be on a google crawlable site over discord.
I would prefer if there were no little dictators, with elections every 3 months, showing detailed stats of the moderators actions, and most of the moderation to be in the style of StackOverflow, so community driven.
The problem is that people are (a) using the 3rd party apps for entirely genuine usability reasons beyond ads and (b) while the API users may only be a small percentage, they're the ones holding the site together. Few moderators use only Reddit official tooling. Some have built quite sophisticated tools to automate their work. /r/music mention of having their own server for some purpose: https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/141tzgd/comment/jn2l...
The notorious Digg collapse was in part because of their fight with a big poster who was dominating the rankings and in the process supplying a lot of the content. They won against him, and the rest is history. Similar with Vine.
I think this might be an extreme case of misunderstanding how internet communities work.
Without comments, HN would be just a boring link aggregator and we'd get very little information if the article was BS or not. But because we have comments we get gems at times where 'the creator of X' discusses the merits of the article. That can be nearly priceless. Things like this draw people that don't upvote and don't comment, but they still get immense value from it.
Posts are what makes Reddit, so much so that Reddit created hundreds of fraudulent profiles in their early days to fake popularity.
Of course this interests me what the future looks like for social media. At one time in the past you needed users to generate and post content. Could we end up with social media sites with 'good enough' bots faking humans that draw in the masses, but few biological commenters and posters would exist?
You're talking about the 3%(?) that actually make the community, discussion, and value (the reason people show up in the first place, randomly or via seach).
Is there a link to this? That's crazy!