“We’re open but we’re not going to approve anything”
Quiet modding
Good news for scammers
Damn, /u/spez is scamming all reddit moderators to work for free.
Literally.always been the way.
Interestingly in some jurisdictions this may be illegal. I am United Kingdom. A friend worked at a medium size music festival (not Glastonbury but not just someone’s backyard). For a long time the deal.wqs.just a free ticket and food tickets for 8hrs work a day for the 3featival days and a day either side setup and takedown. As the festival made more profit for the owners the tax man got interested and found the ticket and food was less than minimum wage and started that the benefit of getting to see the whole thing and be communtity" was just the ticket price no matter what the “volunteers” said.
This is the best malicious compliance so far, still reddit could ‘force’ them to remove the approval restriction.
But subreddits like pics doing the john oliver thing are completely missing the point, reddit dont care if they do that, it’s still getting thousands of views and upvotes because its ‘cool and funny’, its such a ‘we did it reddit’ moment. Just stop using reddit, let the subreddits go to shit with no moderation, make a sticky linking to alternatives.
The point of the John Oliver pictures is to make it hard for him to NOT at least spend a segment of his next show talking about it.
I think it will have the opposite effect people want. It will drive traffic to reddit to see the funny pics, it wont suddenly stop the masses using reddit, a garbage experience has to occur for that.
It might get a short bump in traffic, but I don’t see traffic increasing on the longer term because of this. And it certainly does spread awareness while also reducing advertising value.
But it will get them talking, which is the main point of it. Regular people will wonder why the sub is full of John Oliver, letting them find out about the API changed and everything.
It’s also a way to get people to see what is actually happening from a more unbiased source. Since spez did a whole interview circuit, that might be all some people know about the situation.
This is the way. Reddit cannot expect people to dedicate the same amount of time in volunteer work if they don’t enjoy the platform.
I think it’s a bit more than enjoyment. People felt a sense of ownership in the communities they helped build. And whilst they were always contributing to Reddit inc they still felt some control. Now that Spez has gone full on world’s dumbest capitalist and keeps yelling about companies having to pay for “his” data, data which he didn’t pay for himself, it’s really exposed what’s always been true. That Reddit is just another company, it’s not your friend, it’s not a community.
The new description is also good
14 days? Haha, that’s good. Almost feels like a scam.
Why continue to mod it then? Let the place wreck itself with whatever nefarious modder shows up to do the dirty work.
Maybe malicious compliance is more effective than a full strike.
I think this is their way of not modding but not being replaced by other people who would mod as normal. Malicious complicance as @sisyphean said
r/piracy, r/scams… They’re forcing the best subreddits open!
r/scams was anti-scam, though.
Should rebrand to allow scam guides only.
I’m not sure if I buy this. /r/videos was the first sub to go dark early and hasn’t been brought back. If the admin were really going in and forcing subs to open you’d think they’d start with the sub that started everything and actually got coverage. Not some random subs.
It could be the smaller subs for precisely that reason. /r/videos is high-profile, and is likely to kick a fit, so smaller subs would be a better testing ground, to see what the reception is, before steamrolling the others.
If I were Reddit, I’d first target subs who aren’t able to fight back well. Then, after I’ve proved that I’m serious and not bluffing, I’ll go after bigger subs. This is why many subs are allowing submissions again. In their sticky posts, they often mention that Reddit isn’t bluffing.
And I was just banned from r/WatchPeopleDieInside for calling them out on bending over to Reddit admin.