Yes. Great thoughts.

I saw a comment on a reddit thread recently about the migrations, changes, etc saying (paraphrasing) “Remember how we used to see stuff on reddit and then a week later on other platforms? This place is about to become just another week-behind platform.”

Spez has been pointing out (and clearly justifying to himself) that only a small minority of users are upset with their changes, but that ignores that it’s the mods and content generators - the power users - who make up that small minority. Reddit is about to suck by losing the only thing that made it great. Yes, it’s the content.

When tens-of-thousands-strong communities are voting overwhelmingly in favor of these “malicious” actions maybe we should look at what they are responding to.

Yes it’s intended to hurt Reddit. How else are protests supposed to be actually meaningful or result in any actual negotiating leverage? These subreddits have power in their numbers and they’re just using it.

Willfully forgetting how those things work. Like his hero over at twitter.

Nah this was a reddit thing.

Reddit’s response to all the protests and stuff is that it’s a small minority of users. These moves by mods were meant to thin the herds of casual users (perhaps relying on American prudishness) but they followed all the rules around NSFW content. This response by reddit is more lying and gaslighting.

More gaslighting bullshit from (ultimately) spez.

None of these communities violated rules. They didn’t just encourage users to post NSFW content, they switched the subreddit setting to NSFW which works with the visibility user controls reddit has had for years.

It does highlight the futility of waging a war with the owner of a platform on their platform though. These mods did everything right: abiding by all rules, ensuring by vote that their user communities overwhelmingly support the changes. But it doesn’t matter. Because it’s reddit, the admins hold all the cards. This has been kind of fun to watch and there’s really some brilliant moves by mods in these cases, but at the end of the day for real results the only way to win is to build a better community elsewhere.