A long time ago, I played an MMORPG that was scheduled to shut down the beta world. That feeling, in the last moments, of everything around you seeming just as before, but knowing that this could be the last time ever you’re seeing that world. That community.
I’m getting the same feeling looking at reddit right now.
Sure, the blackout might fizzle. The admins might be forced to recant, most subreddits might return. Even if they don’t, reddit could survive in some form.
… or a digg apocalypse is repeated, and we’re all presently witnessing the last moments before the bombs fall and nothing will ever be as it used to be.
A strange feeling, standing on the precipice of Internet history.
Sort of feels like that last day of school before summer break.
I think that the Digg apocalypse is being repeated, and I don’t think that there’s a reasonable chance for Reddit to stay up in the long run.
It won’t be a OHKO, but it’s bleeding.
And people might say “this is not the first blackout, and Reddit survived”, but I think that they aren’t taking into account two things: scale and which chunks of the userbase are pissed.
For example, I was there when the policy changes prompted a bunch of people to leave, and the formation of Ruqqus. The sub banning pissed a half dozen free speech idealists, and a million Nazi. Most people don’t care about the former, but they were [rightfully] glad to see the later gone.
This time however the company outed itself as hostile towards the very users who are likely to keep the place running, through content and/or moderation: experienced users. It’s effectively a brain drain. Even if the admins are forced to recant, most damage was already gone.
And the ones still there will be less eager to contribute.
I’d think that despite a fair number of folks leaving permanently and new content being created in non-publicly accessible subs, reddit will probably limp along for a few more months - the company leadership has steadfastly refused to listen to their userbase and instead has repeatedly doubled down on their untenable position.
we’re going to need a lot of popcorn
I’m not getting that feeling, only because reddit can easily just reopen the subs and have a call for new mods.
They could do that for the big ones. At the time I write this, 1190 of 5563 subreddits have gone dark. Many of them smaller communities I’m only hearing of for the first time. Some small communities I know and love, but reddit admins don’t give a crap about. Some are perhaps revolving around one active enthusiast maintainer. If they die, they’re not coming back. At least not on reddit. They’ll be gone, and I’ll miss them. And I’ll welcome them on Lemmy or another network with open arms. But what once was, will never be again. Not quite the same.
It’s a small feeling. It’s a personal feeling. A feeling of change.
A memento mori.
Said this elsewhere but they can do that for a couple of major subreddits. But once the list of mods they need to replace gets too large, it’ll be chaos. Also mods will likely take their tools and bot setups with them. So it’s not quite so simple just to promote new mods.
At best, the revived subreddits will be pretty dead for awhile or will have very poor moderation. Like do you see how bad the admins are at handling the platform management? How well do you think reddit can pick community mods? Not well.
And the more holes open up the fewer hand selected mods they’ll have available to plug those holes
It would be hard to do so.
Even if we predict that some moderators there are like well trained dogs, and loyal to their master Reddit Inc., and willing to take up those older subs, those dogs will be overburdened with so much shit that they’ll eventually give up. Even a loyal dog bites back or runs away if abused enough, and the same applies to people. And even if the moderator plays along, the mod is just a human being, not a superman.
They could also invest on paid moderation, but that makes the site less profitable in 3.4 million dollars per year.
@JenniferHighpass@sopuli.xyz mentioned the possibility of them doing it for the bigger subs. It’s possible but Reddit always had some weird dynamics between larger and smaller subs - people would be attracted to the site by the larger ones, but they’d stay for the smaller ones. The small subs give you a sense of community, they’re usually deeper in discussion, and they’re about every freaking thing out there.
There’s also millions of people pissed off at Reddit now so I would expect some percentage of them will actively fuck with whatever the new normal is on Reddit. Being a mod isn’t going to get easier.
Personal opinion: I also think that we should actively encourage people to actively fuck with the new normal in Reddit. The mods staying behind will be the ones who are OK submitting their communities to a hostile agent, so I don’t really feel sorry for them.
