Tyrannosauralisk

Redact.dev worked well for me. Whatever you use, run it now before API cutoff, I have no idea what’ll still work after that.

There are plenty of white supremacist fascists out there. People often call them nazis because we don’t give a shit about splitting hairs regarding if they are a member of the actual Nazi party or if they’re just closely related scum.

The other thing is that they’ve just handled things so incredibly badly. Limited communication largely directed at third-party media sites, erratic rules changes and enforcement, doubling down with heavy-handed admin actions.

I think that even beyond a need for profit they lost sight of why they have substantial value in the first place. The majority of their value came from their community which made “the front page of the internet” a pretty honest claim. Their software isn’t worth billions, but the front page of the internet sure is. They should have had a substantial community engagement department specifically to kiss ass and build relationships with mods (and users via AMAs) so that open lines of communication existed - and they probably should have taken control over key things like inserting an employee as top mod of the top 50 subs (make it standard practice for hitting top 50, offer cool extra services like a visit to HQ and such for the mods so its like they “win” rather than “reddit seizes control” even if that’s what it is).

Instead they stayed way too hands-off and basically treated their community as an afterthought. The poor communication made me feel disrespected as a user, so I can only imagine what its like for the mods who put far more time and effort in and are in the direct line of fire of erratic admin actions. I mean, this isn’t even hard. Just make a vague corporate statement that you’re “very sorry” about all the “confusion” and you’ll be “putting changes on hold an re-evaluating while you work with various parties to come up with solutions”. You make some token concessions and then do 80% of what you were gonna do anyway, 1-2 months later. Its dishonest and shitty but it’s not rocket science to take some of the fuel away from the fire. Like, do they even have a PR department or… did they completely forget that the community even mattered?

Its highly topic dependent:

On political things, speaking for myself, frankly, I learned a few hard lessons over the last 8ish years:

1. Lots of people don’t want to think and didn’t think themselves into supporting what they support.
2. Lots of people are dishonest about why they support/think what they do, even with themselves.
3. Unless somebody is exceptionally rational, you’re not going to change their opinion in a short online argument.

So off the bat my preference is for reasoned discussion, sure. But at the first use of the buzzword-of-the-week (“woke” most prominently right now) you pretty much need to throw all that out on the principal of “you can’t win a chess game against a pigeon”. You can just walk away, sure. But if you’re going to continue to engage you need to be aware that you aren’t actually arguing with the person, you’re performing for an audience and trying to show that the other guys position makes him look stupid, and maybe make him feel stupid too… hopefully if that happens a lot he’ll take a different position (but it’ll be 100% based on feelings, not reason). And this isn’t just online, this is in real life too. I realized that I’m too inclined to just walk away from a stupid argument, which these people view as a “win”. Instead, now I more regularly rudely and publicly make my point and make things socially awkward for everybody. It sucks and I hate it, but they’ll never shut up otherwise and that sucks too so it’s like ripping a bandaid off.

The point is that the sub will be dead in a few weeks, unless the admins double down again, wipe the whole mod team, and seize control to run it themselves or by admin-approved-mods or something. Which frankly as a billion-dollar company they probably should have done years ago in a more graceful manner for their dozen main subs like r/pics, but it yanks the veil off and makes the corporate power-grab super visible.

One thing to keep in mind is that there is an active minority of users who are content generators who are much more likely to vote on stuff like that. Then there are a ton of mostly silent read-only users (most of whom don’t even have accounts). If you inconvenience the mostly silent users who are just there for cat pics on their lunch break, some of them will suddenly put in the effort to complain. But they’ll never build a community, you need the active users for that.

Thanks for your effort!

My one interaction with you or one of your colleagues was when somebody went on a big political rant at me after I described an engineer as “him” versus “they” (which was sloppy, but also unrelated to what I was explaining). You deleted their comment, then they deleted their account. I was amused.

I used Redact.dev. And I’m currently running it a second time since it looks like posts in private subreddits that have since re-opened get reverted (presumably the edit doesn’t go through correctly?).

Honestly it kinda just looks like server issues to me with the delete request getting dropped before completion or something, but still showing correctly client-side until re-loaded.

That said, I’ve edited all my comments to gibberish and left them up in that state. I’ll check and see if any are back in a week or two.

EDIT: I take it back, it’s not server issues.
EDIT2: It seems like comments in private subs didn’t properly save the edits.

Oh, I’ll be coming back. Under old.reddit, with adblockers, to subs that didn’t blackout, and my comments aren’t going to be exactly… productive. May as well rack up a few bans before deleting the account.

Proof would be good but honestly this seems pretty likely. Power users like mods are going to want the account recoverability so they’re mostly going to be using authenticated accounts tied to real emails. And reddit sure isn’t going to want them coming back to stir up their users. If I were reddit trying to double down this is absolutely a step I’d take.