- cross-posted to:
- reddit@lemdro.id
- cross-posted to:
- reddit@lemdro.id
Will this undermine most of what makes IAmA special? Probably. But Reddit leadership has all the funds they need to hire people to perform those extra tasks we formerly undertook as volunteer moderators, and we’d be happy to collaborate with them if they choose to do so.
deleted by creator
I think the blackouts worked well enough. You can’t go to 100% protest mode without raising awareness of the issue first. The blackouts accomplished that. There were many threads where people where people hadn’t heard of the problem before the blackouts happened.
Also you don’t want to come off as the unreasonable ones in this sort of thing. You want everyone to see the Reddit leadership as the unreasonable party.
Many activist movements have hurt themselves by going completely ballistic without most people knowing what’s going on. Demanding EVERYTHING CHANGE NOW OR ELSE!!! Which results in most people thinking it’s just a bunch of crazy people and ignoring them.
So it’s correct to escalate this over a course of weeks. I mean it’s very unlikely no matter what anyone does Reddit isn’t going to back down. But if mods went to DEFCON 1 on the first day, Reddit just bans the “crazy mods” and most people just think “well that was weird that a bunch of mods went nuts at the same time, oh well back to the memes.”
The end game was always going to be to migrate to another site. Sure there was a small possibility that the Reddit leadership would change, but that’s a very slim possibility. But you gotta get caught trying, you have to exhaust all other possibilities before you can convince people to take the step to migrate elsewhere.
deleted by creator
If the /r/IamA thing was the first thing that was tried would the reaction be the same as it is now? You’d have hundred of comments in that thread asking “what’s going on?” rather than in all of the blackout threads.
Reddit is a silly place. The John Oliver type fuckery is exactly the kind of thing that I liked about Reddit. People just being a little silly.
And the blackouts were just a pause. A warning shot. Meant to get a reaction from Reddit execs in an attempt to to still achieve a positive outcome. Sure it was messy, but what do you expect? There isn’t actually a single hive mind on reddit that can write an eloquent well reasoned essay that would sway the hearts of the reddit execs. They only think in terms of money, not words.
The IamA thing isn’t something that’s going to be effective. Read the comment the mods posted. They say clearly it’s not going to change anyone’s minds at Reddit. My guess is they didn’t do a black out in an attempt to act as a mediator. The IamA mods would have the best relationship with the reddit execs given the sub’s high profile status. Maybe they could convince them? But they didn’t.
Look at the timing of it. At midnight July 1, third party apps had to disconnect from Reddit. 8am the next morning, IamA makes their post.
This isn’t IamA mods making the big critical blow that’s going to force the Reddit execs to change their ways. This wasn’t an ultimatum, this is the mods of IamA giving up. They tried to find a resolution, but the deadline passed. Nothing left to do but say “fuck it, we don’t get paid for this shit anyway”
deleted by creator
Agree agree agree. Mod away, but let garbage, dupes, and low effort stuff gradually fill up the sub. See how the userbase reacts to neglectful moderation.
I knew the protests weren’t gonna do anything the moment they gave it a time limit at the very beginning. Shit like that makes it seem like they wanted the protest to fail
deleted by creator
Bit of both wouldn’t hurt. In any case they can end this protest the same way they ended the permanently closed subs protest, by just removing the mods and appointing new ones. The gambit here is it’ll be hard to find people willing to continue to work for free and I hope that proves true, but they succeeded once, for years and people are attracted to being involved with something with such a large following. One might hope also that even if they find scabs (can you call them that if you’re not actually paid?) that those scabs will reach the same conclusion and revolt as well but then again it sounds like in 2015 they were already at the end of their tether and yet it took until 2023 to finally only partially spit the dummy so if you can get 10 plus years of free used labour out of volunteers before they get so sick of your shit that you have to find news ones then you’re doing pretty well and can probably just rinse and repeat.