Quote from the post:
Hello everyone, I’ll try to keep this short as I know there’s been a lot going on over the last few days. When we made our announcement last week, we intended to get Reddit’s attention on a subject that our team found extremely concerning. /r/Videos is joining a larger coordinated protest and signing an open letter to the admins found here.
The announcement was of exceedingly high API prices which we all know was to intentionally kill 3rd party applications on reddit (Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Boost, Relay, etc.) Since that post several things have become clear; Reddit is not willing to listen to its users or the mod teams from many of its largest communities on this matter. Yesterday all major third-party Reddit apps announced that they would be shutting down on the 30th of June due to these changes. There were no negotiations and Reddit refused to extend the deadlines. The rug was pulled out from under them and by extension all of the users who rely on those tools to use reddit.
In addition to this, the AMA hosted by Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, which was intended to alleviate concerns held by many users about these issues, was nothing short of a collage of inappropriate responses. There are many things to take away from this AMA but here are the key points. Most disappointingly it appears that Reddit outright misconstrued the actions of Apollo’s creator /u/iamthatis by saying that he threatened Reddit and leaked private phone calls, something done only to clear his name of another accusation.
So what’s happening? The TL;DR? Effective tomorrow (6/11/2023), /r/Videos will be restricting posting capabilities. Anything posted before the cut off date will likely be the final front page of our community before we go private indefinitely. In the unlikely scenario that Reddit ownership has a sudden change of heart and capitulates on their decisions we will reopen, but until that happens /r/Videos will stay closed. Many other communities have come to similar decisions and we support those who have decided to take a stand.
Wow! I didn’t expect something like this from such a big subreddit. I expect the admins will just take it over though.
Depending on how many other subreddits do this, they won’t be able to run all of them on their own.
Admins may take it over, but a big default sub like that has a big moderation team, and they are all volunteers. I expect the admins won’t be able to find suitable replacements to match the level of free labour they’ve been getting
I have long suspected that many moderators are actually paid by third parties with their own interests. I wouldn’t be surprised if reddit was able to sell mod positions or entire subs outright to corporate or political actors.
China and Russia will no doubt gladly help
Exactly
Gonna be a spam fest there for a while if they replace the present mods to open the sub forcibly.
The admins will take over all the high profile subs. You know it
Mods of niche subs are harder to replace. As a finn, I’d like to see what reddit does if our native language sub went out indefinitely. Big subs have visibility though, and can make headlines.
Do they have the manpower to manage them tho?
This protest is supported by the overwhelming majority of reddit users, it’s not just mods decision, if they replaced the mods of “my” subs, I wouldn’t be happy at all about it.
If admins replace mods, all user should start spamming those subs with all the worse things they can think of, see how well they deal with it lol.
Nah, they will just nuke mods until the top mod pledges compliance. There are plenty of people out there looking to get drunk on a small amount of power.
In practice, what will happen is that a lot of right wing trolls and provocateurs are going to jump into the top mod spots on big subs.
Sure, but from what the mods have been saying in the AMA, Reddit neither has the staff nor the expertise to take over one let alone many subreddits.
I think they’ll just outsource the content moderation work to a third-party.
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Maybe they could ask those incredibly profitable third-party apps to chip in on moderating costs! /s
But they would have to pay for that. In light of “we want to be more profitable” this move would be quite counterproductive.
And once they do that, there will be very little difference between Reddit and every other social media site. They’ll be shooting themselves in the foot.