It will be interesting to see the eventual outcome of this saga. I have already seen backlash against the backlash in many subs. /r/NBA, which was mentioned in the article, had a poll one day before the blackout and made the decision based on 8000 votes (out of a total 8+ million members). Casual users were not happy to find out that they would have nowhere to discuss the most important game of the season, and the mod announcements were very heavily downvoted (the blackout happened nonetheless).
Will a chunk of users stay off the site permanently? Maybe. Will Reddit as a business be better off without these users? Also maybe. There's definitely a case to be made that the community would benefit from more casual participation minus power tripping and over moderation from the top 0.01%.
> It will be interesting to see the eventual outcome of this saga.
For sure.
Knowing there’s a backlash against the backlash, I wonder if Reddit triples down and forcibly flips back to public all the top subreddits that went private.
There’s the problem of real quick finding new mods for like 8,000 subreddits. I’m sure the tail is long, but they’d probably start with the biggest and work their way down.
Ultimately all the data and code lives on Reddit servers. They can do whatever they want. The way they’ve acted so far I don’t see them backing down.
>Will Reddit as a business be better off without these users? Also maybe. There's definitely a case to be made that the community would benefit from more casual participation minus power tripping and over moderation from the top 0.01%.
Casual participation doesn't get the job done.
The idea that reddit would benefit without these users is just a complete misunderstanding of what reddit is and what creates reddit's value.
Ok, but why can't reddit serve both types of user?
Split old.reddit off into an "old school" version that has 3rd party apps, but needs a subscription to access. Then keep new reddit as their tiktok Instagram clone.
Moderators _seriously_ underestimate how hated they are. At this point I'd rather the admins just take back the subs and let the voting system sort it out. Like how it did for the first 10 years of the site's life.
It's not that Godwin's law meant you lost the argument. Godwin's law was just an observation, that a common evil, is an easy thing to reduce someone who disagrees with you to. So you have to avoid doing that, if you want to be able to maintain any level of discourse.
That, of course, goes out the window when the person you're arguing with legitimately identifies as a Nazi.
> Nazis are very fringe, they don't outnumber anybody else and can't outvote people either
Respectfully, Twitter is kind of living proof of the opposite -- clearly they can overwhelm/outvote people (and even out-spend regular folks, if you throw an $8 price tag barrier up), despite being a small number of the total population.
I don't use twitter but I sincerely doubt nazis outnumber regular users on twitter and I don't think you have real data to back up that claim. Remember, ragebait works by finding the most egregious instances of things and misrepresenting them as typical occurrences.
The same way moderators could go create their own version of reddit. Or you an I could just start a new basketball league. Or create a new internet if we are unhappy with the existing one.
Sure it does. If "casual users were not happy to find out that they would have nowhere to discuss the most important game of the season" (an assertion that is incredibly laughable) and were really that upset, there could've been an r/NBA2 in half a second - far easier than recreating Reddit itself or making their own league. And yet, nobody did that...
I mean, I guess I assumed nobody had created an alternative NBA subreddit during the drama that OP highlighted - my fault for being flippant. If anything, the fact that r/NBA2, and a bunch of other similar subs that a flagged comment mentioned in response to me, already exist only further highlights the absurdity of the claim that there's nowhere to discuss the game if r/NBA is blacked out.
A thousand people create alternative NBA subs and discussion boards every day. How will everyone know which exact one of them to go to?
If you think the solution to blocking a sub (or all of Reddit) is "a hundred million people can just all decide to go somewhere else the next day", you fundamentally misunderstand how the community and network effect works.
I mean, it's really not at all that difficult to search for subs on Reddit and see how active they are, and then subscribe accordingly and join in on the convo. Who cares if everyone goes to the exact same one? If people spread out to a few active subs, then the discussions will continue there. A few million here, a few million there.
Some of that hundred million would disappear, sure, but hey - what percentage of subscribers are relatively inactive anyway?
Will a chunk of users stay off the site permanently? Maybe. Will Reddit as a business be better off without these users? Also maybe. There's definitely a case to be made that the community would benefit from more casual participation minus power tripping and over moderation from the top 0.01%.