I mean don’t get me wrong, its cool a lot of subs have and still are participating in the blackout, but I think it wouldve been better to link a new home for the subreddits participating somewhere in the private message. Show spez, hey if you dont change, we aren’t going to use your site (or use it less).
I think a lot of (Americans, at least) have poorly understood ideas about what protesting is and how it’s supposed to work–in no small part, I think, due to the sanitized way we’re taught about things like the Civil Rights movement. The idea that a simple show of solidarity with an announced end date would, I guess, guilt trip(?) Spez into doing the right thing was always an absurd idea, divorced from reality, and only slightly better than doing nothing at all. There’s been headlines all day about Spez’s comments about waiting for the blackout to blow over, but that’s pretty explicitly what the people behind the blackout said would happen.
Admittedly, prolonged blackouts will probably just lead to the offending moderators being replaced with new, compliant mods, but that’s still the preferable outcome. It at least leverages the unpaid but not unskilled labor moderators currently put into Reddit into something vaguely tangible–the effective and smooth running of otherwise unwieldy subreddits. Large-scale subreddits that can only function with expansive moderator tools, automod, etc. will potentially suffer noticeably when being operated by new scab mods. That decreased user experience would actually be potentially effective.
It’s also why federation is important. Maybe I’m just old and miss the web 1.0 days, but the current social media landscape is a cancer of enshittification. Kevin Rose killed Digg, Mark Zuckerberg killed Facebook (and Instagram), and Spez is killing Reddit. We need a decentralized internet, even if it’s intuitive at first.
Most of us would not have tried out lemmy and kbin if reddit didn’t implode. It’s a bit rough being so new but it’s promising and content is flowing.
Success will be measured in $$$ and that’s loss of ad revenue. So far, no revenue has been lost because all the buys were placed and paid for pre-Blackout.
The acid test is the 2-weeks from the Blackout - will advertisers flee Reddit for more stable/predictable pastures OR will u/spez and company be able to talk them in to staying by offering concessions for the disruptions in audience delivery?
Stay tuned until July 1: u/spez doesn’t seem like a real flexible kinda guy so far but we don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes.
No, don’t point redditors to our servers, let them find by themselves. It’s a great filter. If someone is motivated enough to leave reddit then he will find us.
I was hoping the threat of the blackout would be enough, but Reddit knows what it wants and will either force the change or die trying. This is not good community stewardship. We should all find a new home.
The win from the protest for me is discovering the Feddiverse. In time it will be just as good as Reddit for community and information. I intend to use it, and support it though content and money.
I was hoping the threat of the blackout would be enough, but Reddit knows what it wants and will either force the change or die trying. This is not good community stewardship. We should all find a new home.
Well said. I’d add that the Enshittification is complete for Reddit.
