How long before they admins swoop in and change ownership of the blacked out subreddits?
You get an immense amount of power with very little accountability except to the community. Put that in the wrong hands and you can destroy a community incredibly quickly.
Or, put power in the hands of a dilettante, and you get overrun with spam and insults very fast.
And any sub with serious activity will have power mods submitting applications for take-over so they can commercialize it.
1. A reddit request was made in 2018 when you were banned. This was manually approved by the admins: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/8m8cdm/reque...
2. The new mod heavily restricted posts, seemingly for three years. They declined to reply to messages for nine months, until a new Reddit request happened on Jan 3 2021. A comment in that thread said "there hasn't been a new post in ages!", confirming your replacement had locked the place down: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/kpf083/reque...
3. Sometime between Jan 3 and Jan 19th, the request was approved. Likely closer to the 19th, the day the new mod posted: https://www.reddit.com/r/radioastronomy/comments/l0j6qj/new_...
Sub seems alright now, but after a three year long false start with an inactive mod who locked the place down.
Further, it took up to 16 days to handle the request. For a very small sub. And I've seen reddit requests take much longer.
Now reddit would have to, at a stroke, replace at least 8,000 of their most active subs, all at once, and make sure they don't appoint people who are insane, or draconian, or power hungry, or in it for their own profit, etc.
I don't see this working. You may have some knowledge of /r/radioastronomy in those periods which contradicts what I wrote, but the public record suggests the transition wouldn't bode well for mass replacing every single moderator at once.
92% of reddit is down right now.
It's a very cynical move, but you've laid out in exquisite detail why it's their ONLY move, other than walking back their policy. While the company as a whole would benefit from that walkback, I think Mr. Huffman himself would probably lose his job.
A reddit admin just posted this:
> We also want to reiterate that we respect your decisions to do what’s best for your community, and will do what we can to ensure you're safe while doing so. However, we do expect that these decisions have been made through consensus, and not via unilateral action. We ask that you strive to ensure that your moderator team is aligned on community decision-making – regardless of what decisions are being made. If you believe that your community or another community is being subject to decisions made by a sole moderator without buy-in from the broader mod team, you can let us know via the Moderator Code of Conduct form above.
They’re hoping to have some lower level mods who disagree with going private turn to the admins. I doubt it would work but might reopen a few subreddits.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/147ysr6/moderat...
It would also be a huge invitation for the displaced the rest to make life unbearable for those new mods and the handful of admins overseeing them. Reddit as a community would make for one hell of an intellectual DDOS.
I think it's more like there are a small number of users who are mods on a huge number of subs, but there are other mods that focus more directly on the actual moderation of those subs.
To borrow from another comment buried below: I think the company cares more about the appearance of "business as usual" in the face of an IPO than the opinions of the users.
In their eyes, this is all nothing more than a tempest in a teapot; a small pothole on the road to public investor dollars.
All of this in the post-Fed rate hike world where money isn't free. Besides I feel it's important to remember that Reddit has been talking about an IPO for many years, and I doubt it's going to happen now.
it depends on volunteers to function at all. Posters and commenters are volunteer too, which is something reddit oft seems to forget.
Enter: an army of scab accounts ending in _GPT.
The only thing that I'll be able to guarantee is that you'll really not like me as a mod.
After that, they'll definitely reclaim the shuttered subreddits with new moderators.
In their eyes, this is all nothing more than a tempest in a teapot; a small pothole on the road to public investor dollars.
If they do that, forget IPO, there will be no more reddit at all.
right now they already missed the IPO point years ago, today for a company to have a successful IPO they need more than good MAU numbers, and this API change was never going to get to the profitability numbers they need for a good IPO
Their IPO dreams were fucked long before today
Having /r/Pics down permanently because of a protest would be a problem, but a poorly moderated /r/Pics would not. The quality would just go down, and Reddit would get a good justification for locking it down.
"No, /r/Pics wasn't shut down because of the protest, it was shut down because there were too many law-breaking posts. And you know how tough we have to be on those kinds of posts."
At least, that's my take on how most investors would look at it. Investors love companies who focus on profitability, regardless of their long term perspective.
You seem to believe a low quality /r/pics would bring in traffic, even more weirdly you seem to believe the admins shutting down /r/pics because of illegal content, is better for profitability then it being shut down because of a protest, not sure how that works....
Traffic, and users drive profitablity, High Quality User Generated content drives that traffic and attracts users
If reddit loses high quality user generated content, there is no traffic, and thus there is nothing to sell to be profitable, no ads, not API, nothing
it would not matter if /r/pics was shutdown in protest, or shutdown because of poor moderation, it is still shut down, and thus no profits from it.
investors love companies that are profitable, especially right now when the cost of capital is very high. "focusing on profitability" is not the same as delivering profitability. Investors right now want results, not power points about how they project the results being
If they take over these subs, you just radicalise the users, and you now have to find new moderators for these subs. In a worst case scenario, users actually start migrating to another platform.