@AlmightySnoo
These admins are such assholes, they can't even maintain a clear narrative about what they're doing and why. They tell the mods they have to reopen their subreddits because that's what the users want, and of course Reddit administration is looking out for the users! And then when those same mods do a poll of what their users actually want and they get malicious compliance like John Oliver pictures or NSFW content, suddenly that's a violation of the rules. I thought mods were supposed to serve their communities and respond to their desires, as reflected in the polling?
There isn't even a figleaf anymore, they might as well just say "this is bad for the IPO so we're going to screw you over however we feel like any given moment."
the ironic part is, you know what's really bad for their ipo? pissing off enough of the userbase so that a lot of their mods, power users, and lurkers alike defect to lemmy.
they could have increased api fees just enough to cover all of their costs and not force apollo and sync and baconreader and everyone else to shut down. they had a lot of goodwill built up and reasonable price increases would have been perfectly acceptable: everybody knows they've never been profitable, but that would have made their ipo go off without a hitch. instead, they decided to be dicks and fuck themselves over.