For funzies, and because the only *other* place I go on reddit is still closed

[conuly]

I popped by the mod sub to see what they were saying. Unsurprisingly, they have rather a lot of corporate shills. I say shills, I don't know if they're getting paid or if they're just that enthused about reddit corporate policies, but I sure hope it's the former because they're putting forth what has to be the most ridiculous argument I've seen in a while, namely, that reddit moderators have no moral right to go on strike or to engage in any other form of protest against reddit corporate decisions other than leaving the site, because they're not even paid employees.

Yeah, the site only operates because they give hours of their time and labor - many hours in the more active subs - but if they're not getting paid they shouldn't even have any opinions.

Those priorities are seriously screwed up. Like, whatever you think about this strike or third party APIs or whatever, labor is labor. (Note: I wouldn't be surprised to hear that unpaid volunteers cannot legally "go on strike" in the USA, however, the argument being put forth isn't a legal one but a moral one, therefore, that point is not valid.)

Comments

[swingandswirl]

It is so very baffling to me why the corporate overlords at Reddit thought that pissing off the people who do the free labour that keeps their site running would end well.

[siderea]

I'm not at all baffled. Unfortunately, Reddit has the upper hand here. They literally have the servers hostage. They have the communities themselves hostage.

Sure, the mods can shut them down in protest. But that doesn't work forever. Shutdown online spaces lose value as bargaining chips. The longer a sub is shut down, the less currency and importance it has.

Like, how long do you think r/aww can be shut down before its users wander off to get their cute kitten pix somewhere else?

What will inevitably happen is that users who want to exchange cute kitten pix will found some other forum. It might even just be a new sub on Reddit. And then nobody much will care if r/aww is up and running.

And I feel pretty mortally sure of this because the psychotherapists of Reddit went around this block a year ago: r/psychotherapists was taken closed by its mods substantially over the objections of its membership, so ~everybody just migrated r/therapists, which already existed but which was almost entirely unused. (BOY was the r/therapists mod surprised.) Then nobody much missed r/psychotherapists.

Reddit absolutely has reason to think they can outlast this, and then everything will be back to normal, even if the names of a bunch of subs will have changed. Honestly, the most hopeful thing is that they feel the need to force subs to reopen, which suggests the strike is causing them more pain than is obvious. So maybe for some non-obvious reason, they can't endure a strike, and have to move to end it. In which case maybe the strikers will prevail. I hope they do.

[conuly]

Honestly, the most hopeful thing is that they feel the need to force subs to reopen, which suggests the strike is causing them more pain than is obvious.

Yeah. The only thing I can figure is they're genuinely worried that they're not going to be able to replace the mods at the same cost and quality. But they can always find crap mods, and continue to not pay them.

[crystalpyramid]

What are they going to do, withhold their wages for an illegal strike? Oh wait.

[conuly]

Their current threat appears to be "Either knock it off, or we'll straight-up remove you and put in new mods, also, we'll make it a lot easier for regular users to get mods removed".

[crystalpyramid]

Because decent people watching this will still want to be mods...

[conuly]

Ah, well, the shills have two lines about that, namely:

1. All the mods are abusive assholes on a power trip, and that's why I've been banned from every sub I've ever posted in! For no reason!

2. But it's about the users, and the users don't care about third party apps or any of this, they just want/need to browse reddit. (To be clear, other than emphasizing that the official app is terrible for visually impaired users and that, in general, more options is better even for users who have no desire to use them, I think the moderators engaged in this have been pretty upfront that this is about their ability to do their jobs. Just like paid employees. If the cashiers at my local grocery store go on strike, I wouldn't expect them to ask me first either.)

[siliconshaman]

Sounds like conservative 'ethics' again...

Seriously, they never should've stopped teaching ethics in school... along with civic studies, logic, and a whole raft of other things a healthy society needs but aren't of any utility to a society that focuses on monetary value and preparing kids to be good little worker drones.

[thewayne]

Steps to Increased Profit:

1. Piss off moderators and users
2. Drive off users
3. ...
4. PROFIT!

Clearly the CEO is an underpants gnome.

[conuly]

I actually don't know how much the average user knows or cares about the issues leading to this. But pissing off your staff to this level is just a bad idea in general.

[thewayne]

It absolutely is.  I can understand the CEO needs to drive profit, and server farms and network interconnects are not free.  But to spring such high rates on such short notice was really stupid.

[cynthia1960]

I've been on reddit for fountain pens and cat pictures, but I want said subreddits to stay dark for as long as they can. The official app is laden with bullshit ads and even before the latest bs is horrible to use.

Learning more about how it's all running on volunteer labor that can get ditched at the company's whim? Yeah, I'm deleting the app.

[silveradept]

This seems like normal corporate reasoning, using the assumptions that people are fungible and good moderation can really be grown or taught if the current crop turn out to want the corporation to change in some manner.

It's foolish, but I suspect the owners of Reddit believe they have sufficient lock-in that nobody will go anywhere else and they can keep making things worse for those who are there.

[conuly]

The internet is still not that old, and corporatization is younger still, and it's already littered with the corpses of social media sites which thought they were too big to fail and that you could just keep saying "If you don't like it - leave!" and never see your userbase do so.

[silveradept]

Sure, but it also seems to be a standard corporate belief that they are Not Like Other Companies and therefore what happened somewhere else won't happen to them, sometimes even saying that while it is happening to them.