I can’t speak for other subs, but we used the tools available to us to try and get a sense of what over 1mill people wanted to the best of our abilities and the vote was overwhelmingly in favor. If you wanted to convince me that it was rigged, you could at least ask how our sub conducted the vote or explain why it was rigged. If you already know how we conducted the vote, I am all ears for alternatives.

Additional note (not how we conducted the vote btw): the announcement that we were going dark and the vote post were among the highest-engaged posts of all time on the sub at the time. People were clearly engaged on a sub that is generally pretty quiet despite its size and the support was overwhelming, and we gave people days to vote after a pre-vote post saying it was coming so there was ample time to learn about it and participate. If you have a way for conducting truly democratic polls on Reddit, we would love to hear it, because we have been asking Admins for years for something at least better than Reddit’s own poll system and they never gave us a decent upgrade.

I’d also be curious to know how you sort out people who subscribe and never came back vs. people who are generally engaged and people who aren’t even part of the community. Who gets to vote? Who doesn’t? How do we separate them?

TL;DR: you seem to be upset with how we did our vote and alluding to some option we should’ve taken advantage of. Frankly, I’d be incredibly impressed if you solved the problem online polling, especially on Reddit.

The only reason I am really hammering this whole thing is because I’ve heard this so many times, but nobody has offered us an alternative. Not once. So we could’ve truly been little tyrants in our little kingdoms and just did it without even trying to gauge the community, but instead we did the best we could and people got angry anyway. We fielded people for weeks on discord throughout it, we spent countless hours both on calls and by text discussing this, we took the decision very seriously and did it because we truly believe the changes are bad for reddit and our communities.

Ultimately there’s just no winning when some people simply won’t accept the result they don’t like. I’m not accusing you of this, but a lot of the “it was rigged“ and “this is just a power trip“ came from people who simply did not want the sub closed for any reason and there was literally nothing we could do to satisfy them. Not that we had any decent options beyond what we used anyway.