Will this undermine most of what makes IAmA special? Probably. But Reddit leadership has all the funds they need to hire people to perform those extra tasks we formerly undertook as volunteer moderators, and we’d be happy to collaborate with them if they choose to do so.
Honestly? Good. The protests were incredibly weak. Going dark for a couple days, or even a week or more, was NEVER going to do anything. Of course Reddit was going to force you to do the bare minimum. That’s where the protest is. The bare minimum. Yet everytime I suggested it in the early days of the protest I was downvoted to hell. When r/Pics went with the John Oliver I said the same thing and it got a bit more of a reaction. It’s taking WEEKS to get to this point.
Reddit relies entirely on free moderation. Facebook and other companies pay their mods but reddits whole thing was “Your community, your rules! You just gotta follow some basics.” If you haul out the moderation from under their damn feet then reddit will end up with a non-existent valuation. Yet I suspect the reason this is taking pathetically long to get to this point is because most of the mods are terrified of the idea of giving up the power they’ve had for ages.
I think the blackouts worked well enough. You can’t go to 100% protest mode without raising awareness of the issue first. The blackouts accomplished that. There were many threads where people where people hadn’t heard of the problem before the blackouts happened.
Also you don’t want to come off as the unreasonable ones in this sort of thing. You want everyone to see the Reddit leadership as the unreasonable party.
Many activist movements have hurt themselves by going completely ballistic without most people knowing what’s going on. Demanding EVERYTHING CHANGE NOW OR ELSE!!! Which results in most people thinking it’s just a bunch of crazy people and ignoring them.
So it’s correct to escalate this over a course of weeks. I mean it’s very unlikely no matter what anyone does Reddit isn’t going to back down. But if mods went to DEFCON 1 on the first day, Reddit just bans the “crazy mods” and most people just think “well that was weird that a bunch of mods went nuts at the same time, oh well back to the memes.”
The end game was always going to be to migrate to another site. Sure there was a small possibility that the Reddit leadership would change, but that’s a very slim possibility. But you gotta get caught trying, you have to exhaust all other possibilities before you can convince people to take the step to migrate elsewhere.
Eh, I vehemently disagree. It would make sense if this was a first time occurrence but how many times has there been a blackout due to Admin fuckery that went absolutely nowhere? More times than I’d like to count. /r/IAmA didn’t take part of the protests at all up until this point and their first step was to go nuclear. They pretty calmly laid out their reasoning as to why and demonstrated it.
You claim that the blackouts helped raise awareness about the fact first. They only raised awareness first because they were tried first. If this r/IAmA approach had been taken from the start then it would have been a very different conversation. Instead it was just a pity party protest that a HUGE portion of reddit rightfully mocked. The comment section was filled with people who were asking what was going on and then were being informed by people who were annoyed/pissed off at the fact that access to their subreddit had completely disappeared.
You also claim that you don’t want to come off as unreasonable but I mean… how is a strongly worded statement saying “We won’t be doing free work if reddit admins won’t listen to us, so we will only do what moderators should instead of going above and beyond like we have all the time” more unreasonable than shutting entire subreddits down, redirecting tons of google searches, and then replacing every piece of content with John Oliver or Vacuum Cleaners?
If the endgame was always going to be to get others to migrate to another site then there were a thousand different ways to get there that didn’t take a meandering path through an underwater minefield like Mr Magoo.
If the /r/IamA thing was the first thing that was tried would the reaction be the same as it is now? You’d have hundred of comments in that thread asking “what’s going on?” rather than in all of the blackout threads.
Reddit is a silly place. The John Oliver type fuckery is exactly the kind of thing that I liked about Reddit. People just being a little silly.
And the blackouts were just a pause. A warning shot. Meant to get a reaction from Reddit execs in an attempt to to still achieve a positive outcome. Sure it was messy, but what do you expect? There isn’t actually a single hive mind on reddit that can write an eloquent well reasoned essay that would sway the hearts of the reddit execs. They only think in terms of money, not words.
The IamA thing isn’t something that’s going to be effective. Read the comment the mods posted. They say clearly it’s not going to change anyone’s minds at Reddit. My guess is they didn’t do a black out in an attempt to act as a mediator. The IamA mods would have the best relationship with the reddit execs given the sub’s high profile status. Maybe they could convince them? But they didn’t.
Look at the timing of it. At midnight July 1, third party apps had to disconnect from Reddit. 8am the next morning, IamA makes their post.
This isn’t IamA mods making the big critical blow that’s going to force the Reddit execs to change their ways. This wasn’t an ultimatum, this is the mods of IamA giving up. They tried to find a resolution, but the deadline passed. Nothing left to do but say “fuck it, we don’t get paid for this shit anyway”
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I knew the protests weren’t gonna do anything the moment they gave it a time limit at the very beginning. Shit like that makes it seem like they wanted the protest to fail
I know it sounded stupid in hindsight, but hey at least it got the ball rolling on asking the question if reddit was really worth going back to after all this blew over (of course, we know the answer to that already)
Agree agree agree. Mod away, but let garbage, dupes, and low effort stuff gradually fill up the sub. See how the userbase reacts to neglectful moderation.