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Comment by Panzer04 | Hacker News Reader

Worth noting many subs actively voted for the shutdown. It's very much a case-by-case basis.

Also, shitting on your userbase only works for so long. You keep consuming people's trust and you eventually reach a tipping point where people are actively looking to move to alternatives. It would not surprise me if there is a sudden exodus if a suitable alternative to reddit became clear.

I don't understand why reddit has taken such an adversarial stance on the whole matter - it's stupid and shortsighted in such a community-driven service, and if I were an investor I'd be very concerned about management, personally.

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Just as in real life, voting may not be representative of the whole story. Selection bias can occur where people who care very much about a topic would vote for it while most casual users won't even care enough to vote. The polls I've seen on Reddit are a vast minority of overall votes compared to the subreddit size in subscribers, keeping in mind that many lurkers also don't even directly subscribe to a sub but may simply follow them on /r/all, like /r/pics or /r/politics for example. I know I don't follow them but I see them on /r/all and will sometimes click into the comments.

Fair points. That being said, I'd value the participants more so than the run-of-the-mill lurker. One creates the content for the lurkers to consume.

Reddit makes money on the lurkers, but the NEED the commenters and mods to maintain the website as a whole. A straight count of users does not at all reflect who contributes the most value to the website.

There are a lot of people willing to be moderators, out of their 1 billion monthly active users. The current mods were also once regular users.

If Reddit wants to return to "business as usual" the moderators of the considerable numbers of blacked-out subreddits need to be replaced with a fresh crop of moderators as good or better than the current crop, but who also swear fealty to the administration and are willing to overlook the dire state of the moderation suite.

I don't know about you, but I think the odds of that happening without significant bumps in the road are pretty slim, and are likely going to alienate even more users in the process.

> as good or better than the current crop

The mods merely have to meet a minimum threshold of quality, they don't have to be as good or better than the current ones. The original mods were also regular users, with all of the averageness that comes with that.

At the end of the day, if you don't care enough to participate you are obliged to accept the outcome that results. If you don't like the results, it's time to participate, continue to watch, or pack up.

Sure. At the same time, if you hold a protest on a platform you don't control, don't be surprised if the platform owners seek to remove you from the platform. A private entity is not obliged as a democratic government is to support the will of their users.

Mastodon, Lemmy, kbin, and the fediverse in general, are right now experimenting an unprecedented growth in number of instances, users, and activity.

Upvotes/downvotes are not good for democracy. Especially if the upvote/downvote history stays in your account. Think of the yes and no stickers in the Soviet Union and other totalitarian countries on the front of their government buildings. Even, moderators can pin their thoughts. It is not easy to express a different kind of opinion in the first place.

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