I'll repeat what I've been communicating to some friends that are also mods: don't bother with half measures, "the community voted for a joke with John Oliver!" or "technically we are not violating the ToS!" - Reddit doesn't care, this isn't a court battle, they can and will change whatever rule they want.
There's no point in fighting this fight. It's a massive pain to let go of a large community you helped build, but take the little time you still have in control to migrate to Lemmy and don't look back. Link your users here, teach them how to use Lemmy. If doing so means in 48 hours they lock your account, guess what, they would lock your account regardless, "malicious compliance" is fun but isn't a true solution. There's no solution at this point.
Looking at some of the protests, I just see it as a final effort to embarrass Reddit. I think they have collectively decided that the only way to inflict actual, financial harm on Reddit is through the IPO or the advertisers.
thus you have some subs surfacing porn to piss off the advertisers, and some subs going private until reddit deciding to break up the mod teams against community consensus potentially damages trust in the website generally to hurt the IPO
I think it will probably have some effectiveness in the medium term, but I also think it could have been more effective if all the protesting subs called reddit's bluff and refused to reopen. The more drastic the action on reddit's part, the more drastic the media attention, IMO.
@kadu It's not pointless at all. Really it's a warning to whoever wants to start a community. If you do something reddit doesn't like, be prepared to lose what you built, even if following the rules
I read about r/celebrities it was the original creator of the sub, who had run it alone for the vast majority of the subs existence. How many more this happened to, I dunno, but I feel for those creators - what a kick in the guts.
I have been off reddit since the blackout. I will say it's disappointing since I've been using and loving reddit for years, joined the first reddit gifts giveaway and was there for the last and it's just been sad to see greedy people destroy a wonderful platform just to make a buck. But as many have said, fighting a platform on the platform is never going to work. Outright boycott is the only way
Wasn't the idea of this to make more money? If he has to hire people to moderate forums, that's literally a worse position then paying moderators nothing.
@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.
I think their next douchebag move will be to copyright the titles of popular subreddits, and take legal action against competing social networks (like this one) for similarly named and themed forums.
Every time I read a post like this I have a vision of the "You broke Reddit" page with the sad-looking Snoo. Someone needs to make a meme out of that image, but with spez Photoshopped on top of Snoo's head.