A ton of moderators have been making changes to their subreddits’ rules (e.g., only allowing certain posts, going NSFW, loosening rules a ton) to protest without getting kicked out. Do you think this strategy of turning a subreddit into shitposts is effective or not?
I’m curious to see what the people in this community think, so please share your thoughts.
My opinion is that these forms of protest, while fun, don’t actually help. Most bring more attention and activity to the sub if anything, giving Reddit more ad revenue (which is really all they care about). And the few that are actually harmful (e.g., allowing NSFW content) are being shut down by Reddit.
It’s been made clear that Reddit doesn’t care about what its users want and is willing to reorder, remove, and shadowban moderators to protect profits, so I’d like to see more people moving away from the platform. Even if the alternatives still need development and are missing important features, mods should start making plans to establish communities outside of Reddit.
I was thinking about the long term perception of these protests, assuming Reddit does not change course… and after the users who are ticked off get bored / leave for other platforms, the protesting will be seen as trolling by more and more of the remaining users. Eventually there wont be majority support within subscribers for these sorts of actions. Perhaps Reddits supposed mod referendum would come into play here.
On the other hand, subreddits were always before beholden to the whims of the mod hierarchy, and there’s no particular need to do anything to the existing subs to resolve these protests. After all, there’s certainly nothing stopping people from creating admin-friendly alternative subreddits. I doubt any subs with clean sweeps of the moderator team will be coming back quite the same as before anyways.