There's been a few subs knocked out by Reddit giving the mod roles to a greedy powermod. Some "regular" mods are becoming powermods by playing nice with the admins and requesting huge subreddits.
Reddit isn't bluffing when they say "Open up or we will make you." Some teams are reporting less than 24 hours passing between them getting the "admins are knocking on your door" message and the mod team being removed and replaced with a powermod that moderates 100 other subreddits.
It's becoming obvious that you will be opened, like it or not. If mods want to continue to protest, they need to start doing malicious compliance. Subs are looking closely at Reddit's rules and following them to the letter.
Did you know Reddit considers heavy profanity to be NSFW? So you could mark your community as NSFW and use AutoMod to ensure that every post has a curse word in the title. Then since your community is obviously NSFW Reddit can't advertise on it, because ads don't run on NSFW subs.
Other mods are avoiding this approach in fears that Reddit will just ban NSFW entirely. Those are the John Oliver subs. Reddit says "it can't be a surprise what the sub is about" but clearly there's leeway because /r/trees isn't about trees and /r/marijuanaenthusiasts isn't about marijuana enthusiasts. Hence "only pictures of John Oliver"; if Reddit comes after that then they'd logically be banning /r/trees, /r/anime_titties, /r/196, etc. as well.
Reddit says that it's a democracy (it isn't, admins will always be dictators), and that users should decide the direction of the subreddit. Hence posts asking the users for their input. And of course they're only listening to the demands of the users, after all...
The only way to damage Reddit is from inside Reddit. Make Reddit a miserable experience. They're following all the rules! But it's not a good place to be. Then promote communities elsewhere (also perfectly within the rules) to push people off of Reddit and onto other sites.
And they're just doing exactly what the admins asked them to do, after all.
Yep. Doing "The_Donald" approach is the best way to trigger the death spiral, by making the content so annoying and shitty that normal people simply won't care to go on Reddit anymore.
And who is going to mod for them... They don't have nearly enough workforce to do that and if you piss of mods that moderate 50 subs... Well they Stop moderating all of them. Reddit is a dictatorship, but i ask you, what shall they stand on, they cut off their legs.
My perspective on this is split. On one hand, "get back to work", when they're not paying anyone for that work, is upsetting. On the other, I'm sure that all the mods know whether or not they want to lead a community on Reddit or not. No one should be allowed to force them to run those communities; but leading troll campaigns isn't going to make anything better. By all means, leave Reddit if that's what you want. Don't pretend to stay just to ruin it for other folks.
Yeah I would suggest they found /r/PicsForScabs /r/GifsForScabs, etc etc etc if any users have a problem with the new direction the communities have voted to go in.
The issue with claiming that they're ruining it for others is... They built those communities. Literally. Reddit is built by those volunteers - from the literal translations used for each language, to the moderator tools, to the anti-spam system, to the rules, the wikis, the guides, the weekly events. They built it. So it's not "ruining it for others" if suddenly they decide to change drastically how they do things.
Not to mention that historically there have been plenty of examples of mods "ruining" their subs by deciding to change the rules, and until this point Reddit's answer to user complaints has always been "tough shit, mods are gods, you can start a new subreddit."
Why isn't that the answer now? Why not let the users who are upset by John Oliver create /r/true_pics or /r/true_aww or whatever? They always had to resort to that in the past.
Yes, this! I have been thinking, everytime I would have liked the Admins to step in and help, it's been "our hands are tied". I'm fairly certain the subreddif /r/XKCD had some weird shit going on so the main sub for it had to be like /r/XKCD_comic or some shit like that. And the Admins refused to do anything about a troll controlling the main subreddit handle. But now they mods are using their godlike powers for good, Admins can't wait to jump in and fuck things up. I guess mods are gods only when it hurts users, but when they are actually doing what their users want- fuck em?
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