Reddit says it’s ‘not acceptable’ for communities to go NSFW in protest
Reddit believes that decision is “inappropriate.”
All Reddit had to do was STFU and wait for a month or two. Lack of any reaction or results is probably the most demotivating thing in all human experience. Go forward with the plan, say nothing, give no interviews, send no messages, do nothing to the mods or the subreddits, and within just a couple weeks, the users would get bored and force the place to return to normal. Either through pressuring their mods or just starting new subreddits with the same theme as the closed ones. The effect on the front page and the common lurker would be minimal and transient.
Instead, Spez has to go around slinging shit from his diaper at literally every opportunity, taking more and more extreme actions, hiding behind a fake mod name, saying super salty things to everyone, etc. He's basically the only person continuing to add fuel to this dumpster fire. It's literally just him. If he got sick or hit by a bus or something and had to shut up for even just a week while he was recovering, Reddit would lose interest in the whole thing, because without a visible enemy to fight, the users would turn their frustrations on each other. But he's clearly suffering from some deep psychic wound that keeps him from being able to shut his pie hole.
Spez has an ego problem and now he's in too deep.
He can't reverse course and admit defeat now, reddit will keep trying to strongarm mods because they have to win and show that they're in control and not their mods or their users. Ultimately they do have all the power and can ban everyone and remove all the mods and replace them, but it will damage the site. Spez doesn't care though, even if the entire site is burned to the ground, he'll have won. And he'll blame everyone else for his loss of IPO value.
No like even today, if he came out with an honest apology video and offered to work with devs on a reasonable API price plan he could still mostly recover and keep all the low effort users.
But for some reason he's hell bent on actually crashing the community. Even the lurkers are starting to jump ship. It's either sociopathic narcissism or a high school shaped ego, but he just can't let it go.
He's had a bit too much of the attitude of, "I'm the founder. All must bow to me".
I've had to deal with a lot of that at work before :)
I had only planned to leave Reddit once their API pricing impacted apps. But then spez/Huffman decided to go around bad mouthing all of us old guard reditors and moderators, so now fuck him. I'm not going back even for a day or two.
I left Reddit and deleted my accounts a few hours after the subs went dark and my feed dried up. I don't use mobile apps, I have no horse in that race at all.
It just wasn't an enjoyable place to be anymore, and that's all because of spez.
My guess, a month or two delay doesn't fit into their timeline. It shows with the rush to API change, and the "convenient" July 1 (3rd quarter) start date. They're going all out to prove Fidelity's valuation downgrade wrong, and show a full quarter of Reddit's revenue potential.
The funny thing is that Reddit said they wanted the moderators to respect the wishes of their community. Mods should be able to be voted out. So the mods held votes about making it NSFW and it won. Now Reddit wants to say, "hey you can't do that".
They messaged /r/Finland and told them that a small subset of users voting on the poll is doing a disservice to the users who don't vote.
Apparently on reddit, not voting is the equivalent of a no vote. Imagine if real life politics worked that way.
Reddit also lied, they said the sub got 20m unique visitors per month while the moderators can see those stats themselves and said the sub only gets 20k-30k unique visitors.
It's nonsense. Reddit wants the moderators to act as paid employees, but for free. If you modded a large sub would you want to be treated as an employee that reddit owns? Fuck that.
Raises questions about all the other figures they've cited with regards to their value to investors and all the traffic they get
Reddit admins will say or do anything they think will push the IPO forward.
They have zero respect or care for the people on the site. To them, Reddit users are cattle to be sold and nothing more.
Forums existed long before Reddit became ubiquitous. They have no unique selling point and I think they are about to find that out.
The centralisation of web 2.0 has gone to the point that the benefits are far, far outweighed by the downsides.
The only thing acceptable to Reddit is that users produce content and drive traffic for free, while mods do all the heavy lifting administration for free, while leadership prepares to pump and dump.
For the people who make their living owning property, having people do most of the labour for free is the best deal possible, and they still couldn't make a profit, or a useful mobile app, or an actually engaging website.
Somehow, after almost 20 years, Reddit still doesn't have an actual value proposition for its product. Everything worth anything is found in its users. And those assholes are going to walk away with massive money bags for it (even if those bags will probably now be somewhat smaller than they would have been had they not just repeatedly stepped in shit and licked their shoes clean).
I mean they have roughly 450 million USD gross revenue per year. They just suck at using it efficiently. Especially when they get 99% of their moderation work and content curation for free.
For being the "front page of the internet," they sure don't seem to understand how it works.
sure, its "not acceptable" that the majority of your users are democratically voting to take these subs to NSFW.
This is the last gasp of the irrelevant. Just like applebees was blaming 'the kids these days' and their avocado toast as to why they won't pay $17 for a microwaved cheeseburger... That generation was out of touch with the modern consumer, and instead of ADAPTING (like capitalism says it does), they blamed what should be "their customers" on their business model failing.
Well, reddit is being just as myopic.
To them its "not acceptable" that the majority of its users have changed their minds and are actively trying to ruin the site. They just can't accept that idea, so the behavior is "not acceptable". Get a clue guys. Just because we keep loading your website doesn't mean we're going to keep being your free content and moderation generators.
What if it's not in protest? What if it's a legitimate decision of the community to just go NSFW?
Watching reddit crash and burn reminds me too much of watching Twitter crash and burn.
I understood that the NSFW content is because the mods stopped moderating in response to being forced open. This being the case porn is a consequence of Reddits decision, not the mods and Reddit should take the blame for any user who is upset by this
Reddit is upset with how Reddit is designed. Cool cool.
I'm sure reddit considers pretty much any kind of protest as "not acceptable"
Of course it isn't acceptable. Going NSFW would hit them where it hurts most, their wallets.
Reddit demands not to face any consequences for its actions. This is the news at ten.
Their app being inaccessible for the blind was 'not acceptable'. They can go shove it.
Spez truly is like Darth Vader. "Pray I don't alter the terms any further."
I don't remember darth vader lying about data
That’s because Vader is Star Wars, and Data is Star Trek.
It should have been enough to just say "We allow profanity which is why the sub is marked NSFW" and would've given them much better legs to stand on with Reddit.
This alternative is arguably less bad than getting some surprise porn in your feed and the reddit ToS still says that profanity is considered NSFW
Logic doesn't matter to admins who are in full crackdown mode. They only care about killing dissent right now. TFA says that mods of r/formula1 were forced to remove NSFW label but they did not contain porn. r/anime_titties were forced to stop posting anime titties and resume posting news articles. ¯(ツ)/¯
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