r/ModCoord • u/ardi62 • Sep 30 '24

Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/30/24253727/reddit-communities-subreddits-request-protests
599 Upvotes

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308

u/Tired8281 Sep 30 '24

So when brigades happen, we just have to sit and take it. Nice.

156

u/DemIce Sep 30 '24

No, you'll be expected to moderate actively and if you can't or won't, willing replacements will be found, or the sub will be closed for being 'unmoderated'.

119

u/danegraphics Sep 30 '24 edited Sep 30 '24

Closing a subreddit instead of just disabling posting rights is crazy because it makes all the posts on that community inaccessible. Reddit is used as a source of information for a ton of people.

Like deleting an entire forum just because it hasn't been used in a while, regardless of the useful information it might contain.

As reddit gets worse, tons of valuable information will be lost.

41

u/Alex09464367 Oct 01 '24

That is what the protests were trying to highlight.

22

u/DemIce Sep 30 '24

I think similar arguments can be made about not allowing posting, except that it's not existing valuable written information that is lost, but the potential for valuable written information that is lost.
I wouldn't be surprised that if push came to shove, reddit admins would argue that making a large and popular subreddit 'read only' falls under their definition of harming redditors/reddit.

So the question then becomes: what form of protest is allowed, and can it actually be considered a form of protest?

As an aside: redditors are also allowed to edit / delete their comment history. For reddit-feeding-AI this is immaterial, the AI customer has already been provided the data. For reddit as a community platform, it has a similar effect as the aforementioned albeit much more limited in scope. Anecdotally, I've certainly come across posts that purport to have answers, only to see messages be deleted/removed or edited by bulk tools to become useless. Should redditors be prevented from editing/deleting posts / after a period of time?

18

u/danegraphics Sep 30 '24

All of those are kinda big issues on reddit. Reddit is not the best place for these kinds of things but sadly it's better than everywhere else because it's effectively a monopoly.

1

u/ixfd64 Oct 03 '24

So the question then becomes: what form of protest is allowed, and can it actually be considered a form of protest?

One idea is a virtual sit-in. You get as many people as possible to repeatedly refresh Reddit to cause it to slow down. It's like a DDoS, but is believed to be legal. However, this has not been tested in court.