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Comment by veave | Hacker News Reader

I hope the admins of reddit will start taking control of the closed subs and opening them up. The content of each one of those subs has been written by the users and it makes no sense that a handful of mods are taking the content and holding it hostage by keeping the subs private. If I were a contributor to one of those subs (for example by posting answers to programming questions) I would be fuming.

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The active users voted to go private in many cases.

This seems to be what I've observed as well.

Across many subreddits, the announcements to participate in the blackout were highly upvoted (>90%), while announcements against participation were heavily downvoted.

Examples:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/146xzgk/meta...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/145s613/rgames_and_t...

That was only for the initial 48 hours blackout.

only a handful of subscribers voted in each of these polls. And we know that the most motivated people cared enough to vote, the vast majority of people do not care about this

There were a lot of people protesting the protest in r/modCoord but they started banning them

Polls I saw were very active for their groups. People who opposed going private has equal opportunity to vote. People who abstained abstained. More important votes are decided all the time by the people who cared enough to vote.

r/modCoord has negative comments minutes to days old. Criticism is not banned evidently. How did the banned protest the protest? Are the protesting moderators allowed any moderation of their coordination channels in your mind?

> Are the protesting moderators allowed any moderation of their coordination channels in your mind

No idea it is their channel

The issue is, they should not be allowed to coordinate site-wide. The whole point of subreddits is to have separate competing communities, not to coordinate.

> The whole point of subreddits is to have separate competing communities, not to coordinate.

Who said this? And what made their wishes law?

basic logic?

No.

...so that the admins of reddit can exploit their content instead?

Letting users create a database of knowledge with the premise that it will be available and then massively deleting (or hiding) that knowledge is abusive. The admins of reddit haven't done so (yet). The day they do it I will call them out for it, but by now, it's the mods.

> The admins of reddit haven't done so (yet).

Haven't they? Isn't making the API economically unfeasible to use limiting access?

My personal plan is to delete all my posts and my account once Apollo goes down. I made most of that content using Apollo, so it seems fitting.

I personally contend that the official Reddit app has already hidden that knowledge. And that it is abusive. As do many others. We are overwhelmed by the urgent imminence of deliberate enshitification. Waiting to be “surprised” is insanity at this point.

I’m not having a fun time with this blackout, but Reddit will be effectively blacked out for me the moment old.reddit goes away. I might as well try changing my diet now, if I’m otherwise going to be forced to change it anyway once doing nothing different leads to diabetes in the near future.

I don’t own my contributions any more than the mods do. My contributions exist only in the context of moderated mass discussion, and in the context of mass audience participation. All broad changes to the context of this collaboration are abusive… and I’m throwing my lot in with the abuses of the mods doing blackout right now.

So that everybody can exploit the content. When you post comments and threads on a public message board, you are giving it away for free with the expectation that it will be available for the whole world to see. It has been like this since the beginning. Since Usenet, phpBB and everything in between up until now.

Should librarians be allowed to close public libraries and make them an exclusive club because they work there and have been organizing the shelves?

Librarians are allowed to strike, closing down public libraries.

That's a strike, fine. What about closing the library with all books inside and only allowing their friends in, like in my example? What about burning down the library?

Isn't that the point of the website?

Or those users could go start a competing subreddit.

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