Funny thing is, it always felt like Pics was unmoderated because of all the stupid pics they would allow on there. This move also inadvertently kills the subreddit different_sob_story lol
Okay it's fun, Reddit won't be able to remove them since a vote was held, but what impact will featuring only pics of John Oliver have on Reddit's bottom line? This achieves nothing and the pics have already tens of thousands of upvotes, meaning the engagement and traffic are back.
My take is that stuff like this counts on traffic being a flash in the pan. At first, it's funny and novel, but as time wears on the hope may be that people stop engaging with funny sexy Oliver photo #93848. Hypothetically this would cause a drop in traffic and engagement, but still leave the mod team strictly in compliance with reddit's demands.
but still leave the mod team strictly in compliance with reddit’s demands.
Until spez changes the rules and allows his supporters to vote those mods out, which he already announced he'd do. That's why the recent actions by the mod teams were just pointless, almost none of them threatened Reddit's bottom line.
They could have asked users to block ads using uBlock Origin, most of them didn't. They could have stickied threads on their respective subs about Lemmy and/or the Fediverse, they didn't. They could have stickied threads where they call on users to cancel their premium subscriptions, they didn't.
Somehow they felt that what would impact Reddit's revenue the most is a silent blackout followed by some funny mischief after reopening.
They chose an action that is not harsh enough for them to be "fired" as mods, yet is strong enough to be visible.
It reminds me (to a certain extent) of absurd protests against communist authorities, which happened in my country back in Cold War times, ie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Alternative . The aim is to make the authorities look like idiots, using force to make them stop. You have to be creative, when you're fighting with someone who has total control over the platform, for me their move makes sense.
Advertisers don't just look at traffic numbers when they do buys ... anyone with any brains will be looking at content and THIS kind of thing will send them running.
Mods are in revolt. Users have fled the platform. And advertisers don't like to be associated with nastiness.
u/spez is in bigger and bigger trouble each and every minute this continues. Hence the Brown Shirt tactics...
At this point it's just one power move following the other. Mods don't have much left to loose, so who gives anymore. Spez on the other hand is a CEO with the conflict management skills of a 4 year old.
The admins have shown that they are not going to flinch so easily. If mods shut down subreddits then the admins are simply going to reassign the subreddits to more compliant mods and reopen them, and Reddit will resume operation. To casual Redditors, it will appear that the site is 'back to normal' and the interruption to their endless-scrolling-dopamine-hit is over.
The r/pics and r/gifs mods see that this is going to be a long game, so they've gone for malicious compliance. The message of dissent will continue WITHIN Reddit's walls, and the awareness campaign will continue.
The final battle will begin at the end of this month when the API is restricted and 3rd-party apps stop working. The awareness campaign will drastically redirect the casual Redditors ' anger/outrage that their favorite app no longer works from the apps' creator ("my stupid Apollo app stopped working") directly to spez.
It appears that spez thinks that Redditors will smoothly switch to the official reddit app... but I think that he drastically underestimates how resistant people are to change of any kind. It will be interesting to watch things unravel. Hopefully, this will be epic, but I suspect that it'll be more game-of-thrones.
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