Like many other subreddits, r/Finland is allowing its users to vote for whether or not they should a) reopen as normal, b) remain closed, or c) remain in protest mode.
However, the admins just sent them a nastygram essentially saying that’s not allowed:
Your community sees well over 2 million unique visitors each month. Allowing a small segment of those users to make a decision for a community forever does not make sense. There are a huge number of people that use this space now and who will in the future
Polling to close is not a viable option that will return a result that resolves this situation
However, mods can also see traffic stats, which show them as closer to 20k uniques per month. My guess is that this is a copy/pasted message and a whole bunch of subreddits are getting this notice.
I thought this was a particularly nasty new development, since up until now the excuse has been that we can’t let these Landed Gentry dictate the state of our subreddits, but now they’re explicitly saying that they also don’t care about how the users of a subreddit vote either.
Every day it amazes me the new ways they find to fuck up
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They gave a fight. If Reddit had just been silent, I bet most of the subs would be open now. Instead, Reddit has fought for every inch and in turn created an enemy to rally against. I was initially bummed and left to support the blackout and figured I’d just reduce my Reddit usage. With how nasty Reddit has acted though, I’m avoiding them as aggressively as possible now.
It kinda looks like when governments pass a stupid law, people react negatively to it and then governments double and triple down with worst stuff.
I had similar thoughts at the beginning. I initially planned to simply manage my Reddit addiction for 2 days (lol).
As the individual subreddits started talking about going black indefinitely, I began to change my mind. When I read the internal memo from spez saying “this will pass” and they demonstrated their complete unwillingness to negotiate, however, that was the end of Reddit for me.
I like your description of them as ‘nasty’ - it’s fitting.
For sure, I don’t think they understand it.
The amazing communities of Reddit can recreate somewhere else - but that means Reddit will lose it’s grip on aggregating the internet.
It’s a good thing - it means that many communities will possibly go back where they should never have left (e.g. Manjaro forums is far more useful and less toxic than r/Manjaro).
What interests me more, though, is that once something gets posted on Reddit, it’s instantly searchable - and that’s an issue with Fediverse.
Insert “They came after gamers” copypasta here.
If only spez shut his mouth, Reddit would come out of this mess relatively unscathed. But no, he had to run his mouth like Elon Musk, but without an army of fanboys to back him up.
At this point I don’t know they could catch this falling knife, even if they 100% folded on everything. The damage is too great.
I think it’s theoretically possible, but not actually possible. Like bare minimum walking back the API changes, apologies to the developers they’ve slandered, maybe throw in a spez gets fired: that’d get back like 50 percent of people who are mad.
Of course, to do any of this spez would have to not be spez, so it won’t happen.
I doubt this is really from spez. It’s the investors who’ve poured money into Reddit as they’ve dicked around for 15 years. But now money is expensive. Personally I think they are looking to tap into the sweet, sweet VC money being pumped into LLMs (for which Reddit’s API is prime training material), which might go down worse than “hey we’re going to not so discretely kill the apps you all have built and love!”
So spez is an idiot, but replacing him wouldn’t change things.
On a side note, my god was Digg’s Kevin Rose also an idiot back in the day, but he was such a far better class of idiot. He did care about the site, even if he was hilariously incapable of running it. You just don’t appreciate these things until they’re over.
Every single asshole on the board of directors needs to go. I guarantee you this is not purely u/spez. And even then I’d be hesitant.