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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

This all shows who really has power and it always has been the owners of Reddit.com, unsurprisingly.

Since these subreddits were never 'owned' in the first place, such things like this was always possible and these 'protests' (on someone else's website) are just futile and the owners do. not. care and will seize control by force.

This 'protest' has already failed right from the beginning. A test of power that resulted in a crushing defeat for the so-called 'protestors' with little effort from the owners.

Did they really think they had any chance against the actual real owners of Reddit?

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The owners of reddit control the platform, but the users of reddit control the content. Reddit has nothing if people refuse to provide them with free content. That's the real power, but unless people are prepared to use that power, they're allowing reddit to control them. If everyone in the subreddits which were forcibly reopened simply agreed to not post or comment on anything in them the effect of the protest would be about as damaging as when they were locked.

I'm so sick of reddit's bullshit and it's clear that the platform is going to get worse from here on out. I honestly hope that people do move on and find and popularize new platforms. Even if reddit calms down and starts working with their users, the competition would be healthy and otherwise, I'm fine with reddit suffering the same fate as digg and myspace.

I can't understand why people don't see this beyond the context of what's happening this week. This is about the future.

The whole affair has resulted in Reddit very publicly taking on the status of a lame duck platform rather than one that's enjoyed by users and is on the rise.

Reddit is too big to be disrupted quickly, like Twitter was. The current leading sites are too entrenched.

But this has all been about these sites taking a very public, tangible, official turn into sites we hate but use anyway because we have to because they're there. This plays out over the next 5 years, not this one month. Facebook didn't die, but no one takes it seriously anymore and after 10 more years it will be Craigslist.

Reddit and Twitter had already gone downhill before Musk and before this, but it was more subconsciously felt, tacit, unspoken. But from now on, period, these sites are tolerated instead of loved. Mocked, cursed, communally understood to have been enshittified past the point of no return. Like Facebook now, they're the DMV of the Internet.

Protest is nuanced and slow. It's ridiculous to see people reducing it to the surface level and the now.

I am so tired of people depending on others hosting their content. If your going to pay a website for something consider self hosting. I hate the modren lack of genetic diversity in the web. I used to spend hours on topic specific sites and forums. Well before wikipedia, reddit, twitter and facebook.

Something something old man yells at clouds. I hate how the internet has become a handful of large sites to the average american. Shamelessly going to plug that projects like mastodon and Lemmy have been super fun and I really hope it's a direction we start seeing people move.

Simple federated sites without some cryptobro vapourware.

Federation has too many major UX issues that don't seem to have easy solutions. Even email, the oldest example, is becoming more centralised. Users would rather hop platforms to use the centralized platform of the year over using some complex gnu social media.

Well, the protests managed to get spez to shove his foot in his mouth over and over. It may not have made a change for Reddit users, but it certainly gave many people a clear red flag signal to avoid Reddit.

> many people a clear red flag signal to avoid Reddit.

As much as I wish that were the case, 99.9% of people don't care, won't care, and want the admins to steamroll this so they can go back to scrolling on the toilet.

This is the same reason the public attacks climate change protestors rather than the people who actually cause damage. People don't want change, they want anyone in the way of their current habits deleted as quickly as possible, and they don't want to be made to think about anything they are doing.

Which is why big subs keep overwhelmingly voting to protest, right?

I had a feeling last week that this was the only plausible outcome. Reddit would have to be incompetent to not assess volunteer moderation as a potential risk with treatment.

The worst possible outcome for Reddit was they start paying people to moderate their largest, most visible subreddits. That’s maybe a dozen or two mods (a few years back 5 mods ran a large percentage of the top subs).

The volunteer mods like to act like they’re mission critical and irreplaceable. Reddit is quickly showing most of them that’s not true. Even arguments like “Facebook spends $500m annually on moderation fall flat”. Reddit can continue to rely on volunteers until subs gain critical mass. Even then, the moderation problem seems far easier on Reddit.

It’s really looking like Reddit is going to get through this while ridding itself of 3PA (rip) and non-compliant mods.

Best way to protest is to walk away.

And live a good life!

I'm convinced 40% of this site has no freaking clue what a protest is. For Christ's sake, by some of yalls standards there's never been an effective protest in all of history.

Like, if you don't use reddit, just don't comment like you know what's up. And if you do, feel free to screenshot me your homepage and tell me it looks normal.

Clues that you might not know what you're talking about:

- acting like the protest hasn't affected the site or it's content

- acting like mods don't literally keep the site from being overrun with trash, trolls and racists

- acting like losing the most enthusiastic users, and those who participated and contributed invaluable niche knowledge to small subreddits, won't affect the long term value prop of the site to users or investors

But hey, were like a week in of it not mattering, more and more of spez's lies keep coming out and some of y'all just seem oddly gleeful to denigrate those that care. I don't get it, doesn't seem very nice to me.

> And if you do, feel free to screenshot me your homepage and tell me it looks normal.

I have two main reddit accounts, one subscribed to "serious" discussion-focused subreddits, and another to all the meme picture-heavy subreddits. The latter's frontpage is mostly OK but the former's is completely desolate.

And ironically most people who power "new reddit" must have been the second one. So either reddit burns or we go back to "serious" discussion focused site, which is win-win.

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