Privating protests definitely had some teeth in the short term, but not in the long term. In the short term, it targeted what Reddit and other social media sites value most: user retention. By privating subreddits, people would be denied access to the content they want (while being served ads), so they’d click off the website. That’s why it’s gone now. It’s sad people are still volunteering their time for the profit of investors. I would, though, argue that privating subreddits was one of the most effective online protestings of recent history
Effective how? Reddit went through with everything they had planned. It could have been an effective form of protesting if more mods had actually been willing to leave the site or at least their modding job for good.
Ok granted, that may be true. I wouldn’t be able to tell as I left in June '23 and never looked back. But from what I read about the protests back then, I seem to remember that only few subs had to have their mod team replaced by Reddit. I think if more mod teams of big subs had been willing to call it quits as a team, the disruption could have been bigger.
In the end though, I don’t know if any form of protest can be effective in this kind of situation as Reddit holds all the cards, and if they are dead set on enshittifying, nothing will stop them. What mods and users should do is just walk out.
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Privating protests definitely had some teeth in the short term, but not in the long term. In the short term, it targeted what Reddit and other social media sites value most: user retention. By privating subreddits, people would be denied access to the content they want (while being served ads), so they’d click off the website. That’s why it’s gone now. It’s sad people are still volunteering their time for the profit of investors. I would, though, argue that privating subreddits was one of the most effective online protestings of recent history
Effective how? Reddit went through with everything they had planned. It could have been an effective form of protesting if more mods had actually been willing to leave the site or at least their modding job for good.
A lot of mods left. You can definitely see the quality of moderation dropping
Ok granted, that may be true. I wouldn’t be able to tell as I left in June '23 and never looked back. But from what I read about the protests back then, I seem to remember that only few subs had to have their mod team replaced by Reddit. I think if more mod teams of big subs had been willing to call it quits as a team, the disruption could have been bigger.
In the end though, I don’t know if any form of protest can be effective in this kind of situation as Reddit holds all the cards, and if they are dead set on enshittifying, nothing will stop them. What mods and users should do is just walk out.
Indeed
Toothless.