People are literally crossing the digital picket line to scab unpaid moderator positions to do free work for admins who are using intimidation tactics against their moderator peers.
if forced to reopen, they should do it (rather than get pushed out and effectively give admins full control), but allow only a single new mod post every day- “day 5 of forced reopening discussion thread” and lock every other post.
They can just go into the management back-end and do whatever they want. Spez used it to edit commenters' posts years ago, so he knows how to rig things if he wants to. Question is, how long will it take him to get fed up with us and get around to doing it?
If there are mods here who are willing to work towards reopening this community, we are willing to work with you to process a Top Mod Removal request or reorder the mod team to achieve this goal if mods higher up the list are hindering reopening.
Translation: please snitch and we'll give you control of the subreddit. We don't have enough staff to moderate all the subreddits ourselves.
So the mods are reopening because they're being pressured. If the good mods would just... Leave, pick up an alternative. ANY alternative at this point. Lemmy, KBin, Squabbles, Spyke, I don't care. They could've migrated the vast majority of their community over before the API changes hit. But they expected a limited blackout to change spez' mind, and it didn't.
If they left, Reddit would be forced to reopen those subreddits with subpar mod teams. Even if they got great mods, they'd be spread so thin they couldn't possibly keep everything up. The communities would fall to shambles, and eventually even the most stubborn Reddit users would go looking for something else, and they'd find the community they loved in a new home, moderated by the same great teams, and they'd pick that up, too. Reddit would be done.
I think they're falling into a Sunk Cost Fallacy, honestly. They've put so much work into this community, into building this house. They're realizing now they built it on top of a fault line, and now the earth is shaking and its not stopping anytime soon. But they've already put so much work in, that they refuse to call it quits and go build again somewhere safer. It's a shame.
EDIT: I would greatly prefer they migrate to something decentralized and FOSS. Lemmy would be my #1 pick, personally. But pretty much anything would be better than letting Reddit bully them into free labor again.
Why would unpaid moderators put up with being bullied around like that by some money grubbing sociopathic corporation though ? Do they have like, no self-respect ?
Not even sure what mods can do on this situation. Cause basically anything they do now to continue the protest whether it be staying closed or reopening but limiting posts on the subreddit could be used a justification to remove the mods. Not sure if full on deleting subreddits is an option but I imagine Reddit could just restore them.