Hacker News Reader

Comment by yxhuvud | Hacker News Reader

While the behaviour of the Reddit CEO was more than a little bit immature and short-sighted, closing down a functioning community in response seems almost as stupid. If they try to shut it down, then the community at Reddit will create a version of it that is not closed down.

View on HN

I'm not a /r/golang user, but I think this is a political statement of 'we will not tolerate the abuse of users by people entrusted with their data', which I think is fair.

Maybe they should just call for the CEO to leave or something.

> I think this is a political statement

Yet when people protested against SOPA/PIPA, we took it down for a day. Not indefinitely.

Except this is the admins making the statement, potentially taking their ball and going home - leaving a lot of people on the court wondering what to do next.

I wonder how dramatic this really is? There must be a hundred forums to discuss go, people aren't so helpless they can't find their way off of reddit.

Dramatic enough for frequent visitors. Forums are dime a dozen, but a community you get used to and grow to like is unique for you. If HN was to be suddenly shut down, I'd literally be heartbroken.

I mean, if everyone preferred to leave anyway, then it would be an empty gesture to shut it down.

If everyone preferred to leave, this would be a non-issue. The problem is, the only people who seem to be in favor of leaving are the people who aren't using it in the first place. On Google Groups, everyone is in favor of shutting it down. On Reddit, everyone is begging for it to be left up.

There is no good decision that can be made here. Spez was wrong and abused his position. But taking an action against reddit will be seen as a 'win' by the people who started the abusive false pedophilia accusations.

I don't know what the correct answer is other than to say that everyone currently involed looks bad, and anyone who jumps in will come off looking bad. Is the only thing we can do stand back and watch it burn?

/r/CrappyDesign went through this same drama when the big dust up around /r/IAmA happened due to one of the female employees at reddit getting fired. The moderator there felt like the community was all about him, and he therefore had the right to close it down.

And yet as soon as he shut it down, someone opened a request with the admins to take it over, it was granted, and the community now is stronger then ever. If mods want to leave reddit then so be it, but they need to stop any delusions that they are the keystones holding their communities together.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com