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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

A medium-ish video game reddit that I participate in held two votes on whether to participate, and whether to shutdown for 24 or 48 hours, and in both users overwhelmingly (95%) voted in favor of shutting down, and for 48 hours.

There is a vocal amount of non-mods who are also participating.

Also "mods" are still users of reddit. When I'm an admin of a Facebook group, I'm still a 'facebook user'.

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In the subreddits I saw polls, all were in favor of the blackout.

It stands to reason that the people most inclined to see and participate in a reddit poll about protesting a reddit policy would be a self-selecting group of enthusiasts (e.g. the 1% rule[0]).

I suspect a vast majority of reddit users don't have a dog in this fight and just want to use the site.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

I imagine so. But when the content is also made by those 1%, what do those browsers do when acticity goes down?

That's the rub here compared to Twitter. It's not run by huge companies/content creators/personaliies providing news, but by users posting news or discussions. And if they leave, that does directly impact the content of the site, despite being a minority.

The overwhelming majority of users on most social networking sites are lurkers. Those lurkers did not vote. I would assuming the majority of users do not even know about the changes or the blackout.

I think that's ok. Without the contributing users the lurkers have nothing to lurk.

Lurkers also do not post content. But I imagine by this point most lurkers understand something is going on. Either because their favorite sub went dark, becasue it posts less content, or simply because news sites are making stories (while being posted back to reddit ofc).

Gamers aren't really normal. They're a group that is especially primed for having these big tantrums.

Completely valid. But that's a non-trivial audience of reddit.

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