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.
Reddit keeps moving the goalposts, the mods adapt, Reddit comes back with “No, wait, not like that!!” and the mods adapt again… this cycle moves Reddit more and more towards a dictatorship and completely at odds with their own Content Policy:
The culture of each community is shaped explicitly, by the community rules enforced by moderators, and implicitly, by the upvotes, downvotes, and discussions of its community members.
People are already in open revolt. It’s only a matter of time before a huge swath of the decent mods that genuinely care about their communities will be left with no choice but to throw in the towel completely. And Reddit will be left with a bunch of scabs, egotistical mods and bad actors/bots to take over modding (or no mods at all)… and Reddit’s journey towards enshittification will be complete.
The blackouts that had no impact on revenue and would totally blow over in a few days appear to not have blown over and are impacting revenue enough to warrant forcing them open.
Which is it fuck-u-spez?
This has been an incredible lesson on what NOT to do.
Every day it amazes me the new ways they find to fuck 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.
Wow, I should think it should be some kind of regulatory concern that Reddit is artifically inflating traffic counts as they’re approaching an IPO, no? For a company whose revenue comes from advertising and user impressions, lying about user traffic is lying about profitability.
But they want users to vote out mods?
They don’t want subreddits to close, but they’ve closed several.
Seems almost like their complaints actually don’t make sense given their own actions are just an excuse…
Christian Selig’s receipts (Apollo’s dev) really underlined just how meaningless their words are, but the way they use copypasted bs at every turn makes it impossible to ignore.
Hell, this all started with them saying they respected moderators’ right to protest, including going private. Utter nonsense.
Users don’t own subreddits unless they make them. The user who makes the subreddit owns and moderates the sub, and has the authority to delegate moderation to others. If you don’t like how a subreddit is run, you’re supposed to make your own, not take it over.
Reddit’s admins are making up the rules as they go along.
Reddit admins acting in complete opposition to Reddit’s own Content Policy 🤦🏻♀️
