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Comment by austin-cheney | Hacker News Reader

Reddit is a privately owned business that moderators access as public users under agreement by a terms of service document.

This is what can happen when you devote too much emotional capital to somebody’s private commercial centrally controlled enterprise. Early contributors to IMDB went through the exact same thing when IMDB sold to Bezos in the 90s. I understand the situation is frustrating but it’s clearly becoming a confused hallucination.

A better solution is to follow the example of Libera Networks after they abandoned Freenode.

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This is spot on. As people, a sense of community is not something we usually associate with commerce, but these online platforms are _only_ instruments to get a return on someone's investment.

The fact that part of the journey involves mutually beneficial behaviours (like using VC money to acquire more users, build a better UX, and make the community larger) is just an accident, and the incentive to capitalise the whole shebang will always win out.

This sort of thing feels like The Price We Eventually Pay for a massive, free-to-use online community.

>Reddit is a privately owned business that moderators access as public users under agreement by a terms of service document.

There isn't exactly a bright line in this regard as what's to be considered paid work as multifactor tests of one kind or another are used, but Reddit being a for-profit business (versus being a non-profit or government entity) has the least level of protection against subsequent claims for unpaid wages from volunteers and FLSA rights cannot be waived. In other words with wage claims regarding volunteer work, being a for-profit corporation is a negative not a positive as that works against an entity.

Libera isn't exactly a good example, it was very messy with that transition and a ton of history/community content and relations was lost.

They don't need to win the law suit as a union, they just need it to get past reddit's motion to dismiss the suit. Reddit would have a bad time IPO'ing with a class action active against it.

That isn't even vaguely logical. It's just a sunk cost fallacy with disconnected wishful thinking as some sort of qualifier for future decisions. People are sad because they voluntarily devoted too much time in somebody's else private garden and the owner changed some rules. They wish they can sue, wish that lawsuit does not get dismissed, wish that this may provide some financial leverage, and then wish that leverage may return things to the prior status quo.

In economics you cannot regain costs that occurred in the past. Attempts to do so only incur further expense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost

Yes, I am aware of sunken cost fallacy. It only makes sense when there is a reasonable alternative. Lemmy isn't it, my whole reply was it is similar to libera and mastodon. Much like twitter, reddit will keep most users and communities.

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