this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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The community is posting about steam, the water vapor, in retaliation. It's a beautiful thing.
This is what I want to see from every subreddit that is forcibly reopened. The admins can try and force mods to 'do their jobs', but they sure as shit can't force what can be/gets posted!
I love malicious compliance.
I dunno, I think just remaining closed would have worked better. This will attract additional attention to Reddit. Also, the subreddit wasn't 'forced' back open, the mods just caved under a bit of pressure from the admins (which we don't even know is true. why on earth are they asking the steam subreddit to open back up when there are so many largers subs still private?). Smells like slacktivism to me, and mods who don't want to lose their power. Meh.
They sent mail to every moderator of a closed subreddit I think. I wasn't specifically targetted. I doubt reddit would really care if /r/piracy opened back up, but they got the threat mail
You'd think so, but didn't the head mod get demodded?
It's funny, but I don't quite get the point of this. If you are boycotting Reddit then you shouldn't be going there to post about things. If you ARE going there, you are no longer boycotting. Reddit doesn't care what you post about. You are still participating in the site. It's just driving traffic back to Reddit, which harms the cause.
The point is the lurkers subscribed there are going to get bored of steam pictures and unsubscribe, if it happens to enough subs then a lot of the passive userbase will end up either spending less time or leave entirely. Since the vast majority of users are lurkers, it'll outweigh the number of people creating these rebellion posts and Reddit should see a net loss in traffic. At least, that's what I've gathered. Please don't shoot the messenger if I'm wrong or it's a stupid idea
I'll add that I think another aspect to this is: if the site declines quietly, you'll end up with users shrugging and either continuing to use it or not. Most people don't understand why this matters at all, and if the post quality declines it probably will be a lot like Facebooks decline. People knew it got worse, but the prevailing narrative is "that's just how social networks work, the kids are always jumping on the next thing".
By doing this, it makes it very clear that the mods and power users are pissed by actions taken by Reddit. People are starting to hear about it, but it's not common knowledge.
If people hear "Reddit users protested then left because of Reddit corporate", investors are going to be pissed, advertisers are going to find it less attractive, and (most importantly) when discord or YouTube consider their own anti-poweruser moves (which they're currently talking about) they'll remember "we need to be careful with changes or we'll have a reddit moment"
I think this all started with Musk and his instance that despite pissing off users left and right, he's made Twitter more profitable than ever and only kicked off bots and scammers. It's absurdly unlikely (not like he's releasing numbers and they are deciding to not pay bills).
But by creating that very attractive narrative, other social media companies are looking for their own ways blatantly grab cash