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Reddit admits more moderator protests could hurt its business
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
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The last one showed four important things:
It can be coordinated super easily and has broad support amongst the mods
It's popular with most users outside of sports subreddits and they're hostile toward scab mods and admins.
Reddit fundamentally has zero response to it and anything they try compounds their issues. They can't offer mods anything short of the wage that 24/7 customer service job for a multi-billion dollar company should entail. They can't censor the protests without it causing a Streisand effect and major backlash which reinforces points 1 and 2.
Mods don't have any control over the subreddit anyway. It's arbitrarily taken away and given to anyone who asks for it. The only consequence for anyone protesting is reddit saying you can't do the volunteer work that you're protesting over the conditions of already. The next schmuck still has to do that work with those conditions knowing reddit hates them just as much as they hated you.
I think the next mod strike is the breaking point for the website. They're going to have a worse response, people are going to be angrier, and the shareholders are going to add a whole new layer of demands that can't be enforced without making everything worse for mods and users. Once that mod exodus hits, the website instantly becomes unusable and full of wildly illegal things. There's no Plan B for that which isn't very expensive.
Another blackout during their IPO would certainly send their stock prices off to a good start...
That might happen but that's not where the real pressure point is. Sometime shortly after the IPO, whatever hype exists around it is going to give way to the reality that reddit is an unprofitable company at the end of a tech bubble built on 0% interest rates that aren't coming back. There is no way for reddit to become profitable without making itself unusable and sanitising the NSFW content that drives a huge amount of its traffic. When the price tanks, they've bribed their 75k most loyal users and mods into accepting the IPO with advanced purchase options at what might be the high point of its value. That's when shit stands to rupture. Reddit will have failed everyone to enrich Steve Huffman and the venture capitalists who invested in their earlier rounds and there's no way for them to control that tantrum spiral.
Pretty sure most subreddits that put it to a vote had the userbases support the blackouts as well.
r/snackexchange was fun. I sabotaged the subreddit by embracing Spez's call for user democracy, making everything about it up for a vote every day. Some weird little goober ratfucked that and the admins made them the head mod, despite them only participating in the subreddit one time ten years before and there being two existing mods who programmed third-party tools we were protesting for. Those tools were necessary for running the subreddit. The users instantly turned on this guy despite me being a more or less absent mod for years and destroying the subreddit in protest. He became a proxy for the admins and caught so much flak that he has only posted a couple times since, and not in r/snackexchange.
There were a few larger subreddits that got mod couped with similar hate toward the scabs, but having seen the worst case example it's great. They do their big power move and it's the
gun. When they threatened to do it in r/Science the guy requesting it was an antivaxxer who markets herbal supplements. Let a thousand fuckups bloom.
But one thing it also demonstrated was peoples will for power and recognition, no matter how small. They enjoy being mods, it makes them feel above others, so there will always be someone willing to trade morals to take the position.
During the previous blackout protest (Vaxxhappened) my sub was a big pusher for going dark, and the biggest hurdle in convincing other mods to join the cause was... fear they would be removed.
It was then that I had my "If there was hope, it must lie in the proles" realization that nothing would change. I had assumed most mods cared more about their communities than the platform they were hosted on, but aside from a scant few that was a mistake.