[spazx]

Smelled this one coming miles away.

Next, they'll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they're dedicated to. Eg. r/starwars to Disney, r/startrek to Viacom/Paramount, etc.

Then, old.reddit.com will stop working spontaneously, just like how they toyed with killing mobile browser access to force users to download the app, which they probably will eventually. That's going to be the final push for a lot more users. The academics, for certain.

Give it a few months, it'll be like FaceBook, Twitter, Tumblr. Ad and bot ridden ghost town, devoid of all creativity - nay, devoid of actual information at all. Just a sinking ship with people still getting off.

Aaron Swartz is rolling in his grave.

[safety1st]

They are done, 100%, this is the turning point and it's all downhill from here.

They depend fundamentally on volunteer labor and every decision they've made since announcing the API change has alienated that labor. The morale of every mod I know is in the tank.

The solution for this was incredibly simple. Reddit you want to charge for the API? Go right ahead, we all want you to make money.

But when the volunteer labor you need in order to function started complaining because this is going to kill the modding tools they need - you should have immediately, like next day, apologized for the oversight and promised free API credits to them until you sort this out.

This whole conflict could have been nipped in the bud, people would have grumbled a bit, but as long as Reddit got their act together in terms of tooling eventually, life would have gone on, and Reddit would have had their payday too (I doubt milking mods for spare change is the master plan here).

Instead Reddit decided to escalate. Declare war on the people who make their service possible. It was the dumbest possible move they could make for their business. The decision makers behind this must operate in one hell of an echo chamber.

This is the end, it's all downhill from here, I doubt they can recover.

Needless to say I'll avoid their IPO like the plague and so will many others.

10 years from now something else will have come along and replaced them and we'll all look back at this moment.

[andrewinardeer]

I disagree with your doomsday scenario.

There are Reddit users waiting in the wings, wringing their hands ready to jump at the 'oppurtunity' to moderate established subreddits and will happily devote their time to custodial duties.

No doubt some have already contacted Reddit management saying that if they de-mod x subreddit they will jump in and guarantee the subreddit's operation.

I don't understand the argument about the lack of free labour drying up. It won't. There are people who thrive on having power over others even though in this case, subreddit moderation, it is perceived power. And Reddit management knows this. For years they have seen how moderators relish and also abuse power. That's why there are moderator guidelines.

In fact, I think it can be argued that Reddit is leveraging this moment to flush out long standing and troublesome moderators which I think is clearly being what the end game is. And Huffman's goal.

It may be silly of me to say, however, I don't think people are giving Huffman enough credit. He knew that there would be significant blowback. He has been involved with Reddit longer and probably far more in depth than any other employee or user. I wouldn't put it past him that he knows Reddit moderation is due for a shake up and is probably keen on getting rid of a subset. And by doing so he can not only pick and choose which users he wants in on what subreddits but more importantly can dictate the culture he wants.

This whole episode if far from over. He has clearly said that the new API changes are going nowhere and I'm willing to bet that he gets what he wants (which includes a mod clean out) with the outcome being a few people quitting the site and people talking about him from now until eternity.

EDIT: Spelling

[pmoriarty]

"The solution for this was incredibly simple. Reddit you want to charge for the API? Go right ahead, we all want you to make money. But when the volunteer labor you need in order to function started complaining because this is going to kill the modding tools they need - you should have immediately, like next day, apologized for the oversight and promised free API credits to them until you sort this out."

From the AMA by Reddit's CEO 6 days ago[1]:

Mod Tools

We know many communities rely on tools like RES, ContextMod, Toolbox, etc., and these tools will continue to have free access to the Data API.

[1] - https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...

[baq]

Some people here laughed at me when I said their financial projections are garbage, obviously have false assumptions given they’re actually implementing the plan.

It’s a sad thing to watch.

[mlatu]

i PRAY for them not to recover. the trouble is, the point with giving subs to IP owners, is extremely likely. though as likely is that reddit will be just bought whole by some ass or another...

i realize this sounds very harsh, but at this point: anything that drives people into federated services is a godsend

[brazzy]

> Instead Reddit decided to escalate. Declare war on the people who make their service possible. It was the dumbest possible move they could make for their business. The decision makers behind this must operate in one hell of an echo chamber.

There is absolutely no way they are not aware of this.

No, they've made a conscious decision that completely alienating and driving away the parts of the communities which care about all of this stuff is a price they're willing to pay.

It seems pretty clear that they believe the people who will leave are not crucial enough (in function and number) to make the overall communities collapse, and that the result they want to achieve is worth the losses.

[kitd]

The threshold for free API usage for modding tools is being increased from 60 to 100 queries per minute

https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/16693988535309

There are a very small minority that exceed that even now apparently.

Seems not unreasonable to me.

[rdevsrex]

Exactly. I canceled my monthly subscription and logged out. I mostly loved Reddit for long for pieces anyway, so I'm going to pay more attention to Substack and see how that emerges.

[notyourday]

> But when the volunteer labor you need in order to function started complaining because this is going to kill the modding tools they need - you should have immediately, like next day, apologized for the oversight and promised free API credits to them until you sort this out.

Nope. The value of being a reddit mod is clout. Clout does not matter to me hence I would not want to skip $$$$ for a clout of one. It matters to them hence they do it for $0.00. As they do not want to do the work, they get no clout. I applaud reddit for nuking them.

[vpeters25]

They were done the minute mods broke their habit of moderating their subreddits. Some dedicated mods might come back, but it is really hard to return to a lost habits so the damage is done already.

[sanderjd]

Yep, forget them, they're done.

[hef19898]

Whatever the outcome of this si, an I never used Reddit, it seems to have been an incredibly dumb idea to do all of that before the IPO...

[zpeti]

Well, if I was Huffman, the question I would be asking is can I bring revenue up so much from api and other things that I can now employ a lot of mods?

He might have made that call already, and it might be possible.

Facebook works with paid mods after all.

[btbuildem]

Classic corporate leader mentality, thinking they have absolute control over everything, just because their employees must do as they're told.

[thesaintlives]

The same echo chamber some of those very mods operate in. Pot, kettle, black. Suck it up. You think the hot air from those servers comes by magic? Plenty of them need replacing. The king is dead. Long live the king!

[randycupertino]

> Next, they'll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they're dedicated to. Eg. r/starwars to Disney,

This happened on the r/audible subreddit, the official audibledotcom customer service account became a mod and started deleting all the threads remotely critical of audible or amazon. The subreddit revolved and they were removed as a mod but it was a solid 5-months of nary a harsh word.

If they ever kill off old.reddit I'm out, I can't stand the cartoony new reddit design.

[drumhead]

The whole reason to Google Reddit results is for independent enthusiast opinions positive and especially negative. Corporatised subs are going to kill that dead for many things. Another nail in the coffin of Reddit. Love of money truly is the root of all evil.

[psychphysic]

Oooof I can totally see Disney buying the subreddit.

[tibanne]

This ^^

[bsimpson]

It's weird to see Aaron Swartz evoked as some sort of martyr vis a vis Reddit. (You're not the first person to do it.)

As I understand, he basically lucked out when his thing crashed and YC asked Reddit to make him part of the founding team. Was he ever a significant part of Reddit?

[posguy]

Considering he was a major force driving the rewrite of Reddit from Lisp (the version that HN is based on currently) to Python, adding features like Markdown support (a language he helped create in 2002), Aaron defined major parts of the site that have persisted across multiple rewrites of Reddit's codebase.

[metanonsense]

I had the same impression as you until I listened to a podcast with Steve Huffmann about the early days of Reddit. For some time, he and Aaron worked quite intensively on the site. From the podcast, it rather appeared that they had different visions about the site. Aaron wanted to build a very different kind of community and experience. When Reddit started to become successful, there was less and less time to work on these „visions“ until he lost interest and basically left the team.

[benatkin]

Lucked out in terms of money in the short term, not so much in terms of finding a good fit.

[luckystarr]

As far as I've heard, r/startrek already started their own instance at https://startrek.website and indicated they will close their sub for good. This may be the first major sub to be handed over. Paramount may then even sue startrek.website for IP infringement, etc.

I'm re-stocking my strategic popcorn reserves.

[jug]

Yep, instantly followed them from lemmy.world. :)

Someone joked that it's natural for Star Trek to join the Federation early.

[TeMPOraL]

Oh, and /r/DaystromInstitute moved there too. I guess I'll have to check this Lemmy thing out - that subreddit was more than 50% of what kept me logged in to Reddit in the first place.

[pjerem]

That they did that and that their community followed is super cool ! It shows that the decentralized web isn’t dead and is a viable solution.

[weeblewobble]

They've already reversed the permanent closing: https://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/comments/14aifzm/rstartrek...

Turned out lots of the community members don't care about this and don't want to move. Shocking stuff

[angrydev]

Interesting that the stickied post on https://startrek.website mentions they have a Patreon setup to help with hosting costs.

> We’ve started a Patreon here: Patreon.com/treksite. There’s only one plan and it’s just $4. If our growth continues like it has, we’re going to need to upgrade our hosting very soon.

$4 is not outside of the realm of what it might have cost a regular user to continue paying for one of these 3rd party Reddit Apps on the new pricing [1]. There are clear benefits to paying your own way: owning your data, stronger community identity; when boiling down to money alone I found it an interesting comparison, since that's what this whole situation started about. However it is certainly no longer just about the money at this point after public comments made by Reddit Corp.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/31/23743993/reddit-apollo-cl...

[irthomasthomas]

And now we get to the real reason for their bizarre behaviour. They want to push ordinary mods off the platform to be replaced by their own drones. You can tell which subs are modded by shills by who broke the strike. Like r/worldnews that was modded by Ghislaine Maxwell right up until the day she was incarcerated. https://www.reddit.com/user/maxwellhill/

[zzbzq]

They could just do that anyway, (and I'm pretty sure selling influence is actually one of the things these protesting careerist mods do, just with more steps) the "real reason" is the API is generating less revenue than what it replaces, no big conspiracy

[olalonde]

Facebook and Twitter are not bot ridden ghost towns... but anyways, I'll make the opposite prediction: Reddit is going to turn out just fine and this episode will quickly become a memory from the past.

[photonerd]

Twitter absolutely is. If it’s not bots, article spam, or ads, it’s the crazy MAGA-crowd jerking themselves off over their fake-outrage of the moment.

It’s an absolute ghost town in terms of engaging, original, content. Their user numbers are obviously buoyed by absolute junk accounts and it’s been obviously so since Musk fired most of the company.

FB is a boomer & genX meme-pocalypse that’s absolutely slathered with ads and most millennials & genZ seemingly using it as a glorified contacts list. It’s a shadow of what it was.

[chrismsimpson]

On the rare occasion I open Facebook I’m immediately trolled by paid News Corp tabloid garbage. Like every time. So definitely can confirm.

[wdb]

Not as ghost townny as Bluesky

[rchaud]

By fine you mean where they are now, still massively unprofitable?

[uejfiweun]

If they remove old reddit, I'm done. The "new" reddit UI is literally one of my least favorite things in the world. Filled with clutter and ads, requires too many clicks to see what you want to see, low information density... I could go on.

[mrweasel]

Someone has to be using the redesign, most I'd guess, but I don't understand how. It's one thing that I don't like the look and feel, that's pretty subjective to a point, but the problem is that it doesn't actually work.

Something as basic as reading comments is still broken, after all these years. You can not navigate the comment section. Seems like a pretty big oversight, unless you betting the farm on doom-scrolling, and I think that exactly what's happening.

Reddit management left the community to it's own devices for years, now the ad revenue is drying up, they have an IPO around the corner (because no VC is going to throw more money into an anonymous message board). I don't really see any easy out for Reddit, they do need money, but I'm not sure they are going about it in the right way.

[spazx]

New reddit is the worst. Who even designed it? Every time I accidentally find myself on new reddit UI, I feel like I'm looking through foggy glasses. Over the course of about 20 seconds, I blindly click around, feeling lost and confused, then frustrated, and then I just add "old" to the URL.

[Karellen]

The worst part for me is all the flashes and redraws as it gradually loads more and more separate resources.

"Hey look, here's a paragraph to read... nope, I just realised there's an image near the top that I think is going to be huge so I pushed that paragraph below the fold... no, wait, that image is actually tiny so here's that paragraph again... ooooh, but now there's a sidebar, so I've just resized and reflowed the paragraph that you had kind of started to read - good luck finding your place again!"

As for how broken the "back" button is, fuuuuu.....

[grose]

Did Reddit forget why they were popular in the first place? Remember the Digg redesign? Seems like every Reddit update has been user-hostile in a way that was much worse than the Digg stuff.

[maxerickson]

Being popular isn't their primary goal.

(I'm not saying I like the changes or think they are good, I'm just saying that you aren't analyzing their motivations if you focus on popularity)

[rchaud]

Being popular used to pay the bills, in the form of VC financing. The jig is up, now they need to make actual money.

[cryptoegorophy]

Any good alternative? I like hacker news for now that it still got some comments worth reading and interesting articles

[andrewstuart2]

Lemmy is still significantly lower user count but honestly I prefer the community at the moment. Everything feels small and jovial. At least for the 12 comments I've posted thus far. I'm running my own, which makes it easy to federate out to pretty much anything and worry less about overload as I'm not really pushing for users.

Thus far, it's definitely felt like a very viable replacement for reddit for the communities I have found.

[growingentropy]

It's going to sound dumb, but honestly? I filled an rss reader up with some of the best sources I could think of, and am actually really enjoying just quietly taking the world in again, instead of trying to come up with my latest snarky Reddit-friendly quip.

[Panoramix]

I liked kbin.social a lot. It's a little rough around the edges, and doesn't have a ton of users, but I found that that's actually very ok. It reminds me of Reddit 10 years ago. Nowadays every thread in Reddit is either stupid memes and the same predictable jokes over and over, or some fanatical social wars stuff. Kbin looks like a place where you can actually have a conversation again, without being banned or destroyed for disagreeing even if done rationally and politely. I hope it survives its technical challenges.

[_pferreir_]

Lemmy: https://join-lemmy.org/

[bluedemon]

There's https://squabbles.io

It's not federated, but the UI is okay for now than the other alternatives that I've seen. It's ran by 1 dev who has quickly been adding features and listening to user feedback. It's also nearing 16,000 users and a few users are developing some mobile apps for it.

[spazx]

Not that I know of. I keep poking around all the ones that pop up here, some of which are nicely made but still small, and I've been contemplating joining a Lemmy instance or starting one with some friends.

[shirro]

Hacker News is till great though the more I get exposed to the whole ActivityPub fediverse thing the more I wish it wasn't disconnected. I was in a read only HN app earlier today and wanted to post a comment to HN and instantly wished I could post a link into jerboa's search and have Hacker News available as a community.

The technology is getting there. The problem is the communities need time to grow. Star Trek fans have made a real effort. The bulk of reddit content is lowest common denominator shit and those consumers want everything handed to them fully formed. They aren't going to deal with server instability and submit bug reports and try and build new communities. They will delete Apollo and install the Reddit official app.

[hiepph]

Lemmy! I've been checking it out lately and people are moving popular subreddits to Lemmy's servers. It's a bit confusing at first but once you get it, it works like email. And it's... fantastic!

But I'll wait for this protest to die down to see its "real" value. Most of the posts now are about the protest and migration from Reddit. Things are on fire now.

[Gareth321]

kbin.social is really great. It’s the most active Lemmy instance and it connects with Lemmy and Mastodon so you’ve got both networks built in. The UX is, I feel, better than instances which use the Lemmy front end. The mobile site is actually functional. Sadly no app yet.

Of course the networks are much smaller than Reddit, but the conversations are much more qualitative. I honestly prefer it. Less soon scrolling.

[Maxion]

Surprisingly no one has mentioned Tildes.net yet. It's something in between reddit and hackernews. Requires an invite to register, though they are quite easy to find.

[quetzthecoatl]

be careful for what you wish for. 4chan went from both good and bad at the same time to overwhelmingly bad, eclipsing and later drowning the good due to reddit's initial purge of problematic communities implicitly encouraging them to migrate to communities like 4chan. Reddit fostered and encouraged these communities (it is said that spez was a mod for jailbait subreddit) in the initial days when its aim was to become the website with most active users/content. You really don't want reddit users here.

[codebolt]

This is giving me flashbacks to when Digg.com committed a similar suicide, which was a major part of Reddit's growth back in the day.

[Simulacra]

I think Reddit is financially unstable and they are doing this to try to become like Facebook, etc. In other words, financially stable. It's a company, if people stop buying the product it will fold like any other company. Time will tell.

[ummonk]

When you’re a company relying on outsourcing moderation work to an army of unpaid moderators, it’s probably not a good idea to drive away said moderators. Especially when your customers (advertisers) really don’t like sites that allow bad content to slip through their moderation too much.

[imiric]

That would make sense if they wanted to emulate FB, which is questionable in itself, but how they're proceeding with these changes is completely killing the very thing that made them successful in the first place. It's as if the leadership was replaced with people who don't understand Reddit at all.

It's a very dumb move, considering they had all the resources and power to do this right, and still increase their revenue. Now they will increase it momentarily, which will please shareholders, but eventually this will die down as people abandon the platform because it has become a shell of its former self.

[philistine]

r/StarTrek is already surreptitiously controlled by Viacom. Any negativity is immediately shut down. If you want to be critical of Star Trek, you have to rub shoulders with people who got banned from r/startrek because their criticism was that there was too many black people in the new shows.

It’s disgusting.

[zeroego]

This hasn't been true in my experience. People were very critical of Picard season 2 and the whole of Discovery. I posted criticisms myself and never got banned.

[BiteCode_dev]

It's amazing that after 20 years of this, people hasn't yet learned that:

- Corporations are not your friends. - Things changes. - What you put there is their property. - Your free work is their money.

[ExoticPearTree]

Unless we'll find a way to have neutral sites that can run a discussion forum such as Reddit and others, this problem will be recurring.

Say Reddit goes under, there will be another company looking to fill the vacuum. It will play nice for a year or two until they have the majority of the market and then become an asshole company looking to censor whatever they don't like and become hated just like the company they displaced.

Somehow I think people lose their minds when they feel like they have any sorts of power over others...

[yanderekko]

>Next, they'll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they're dedicated to. Eg. r/starwars to Disney, r/startrek to Viacom/Paramount, etc.

This is obviously not going to happen, and insinuations to the contrary are just sour grapes. The fact that this could even be upvoted speaks poorly to the Redditization of HN.

>Aaron Swartz is rolling in his grave.

He has been for years. These same powermods have been at the forefront of demanding changes that undermined his vision.

[raxxorraxor]

Ironically when the problems with bots allegedly writing unfavorable opinions came up, bots were quite a rare occurrence. When I look at some of the defaults now, it reads like the simplest AI generated flavor text that is tuned to the ever same topics. Brain dead market research output without any information.

You really notice this if you compare it to more specialized subs. Even if they are very active with thousands of users, the style of communication is different. It isn't trivial to detect bots, but I think some particular subs might be very infested. Another reason to perhaps scrap API access before someone takes a closer look.

This strategy of decline seems to be inevitable. When they distanced themselves from Swartz and did away with their principles to satisfy some other interests, it was the start of some form of decline, even if the official business numbers look different.

There are business numbers that show an increase in usage, but as a user you cannot feel that at all. On the contrary, it feels like it is moving in a different direction. Perhaps they changed their budgeting somehow to boost their revenue... Or some really rich clients bought a massive amount of reddit goodies.

[hparadiz]

old.reddit.com is the only way that I can use reddit. I tried the new interface and it's just so bad. The change isn't subtle either. It's like using a completely different site.

[cookiengineer]

> Next, they'll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they're dedicated to. Eg. r/starwars to Disney, r/startrek to Viacom/Paramount, etc.

They have to be platinum ad partners in order to get their subs, of course. Just like how yelp extorts companies for reviews, reddit now extorts companies for comments.

[TeMPOraL]

That would be a dangerous game to play with Disney or Paramount/CBS. I'd sooner assume that /r/starwars and /r/startrek serve at the pleasure of their respective IP holders, and I don't believe Reddit has pockets deep enough to challenge either of them.

I mean, Star Trek fans are used to seeing every interesting creative fan project shut down by a C&D letter - and as for Star Wars, everyone knows you don't go up against the House of the Mouse.

[princevegeta89]

So much user-generated content going to waste. Idiots at Reddit forgot who was responsible for everything that is in place today, and they forgot the unrewarded work and countless hours of time the moderators and everyone else put in.

This is going to be an upside down tumble, and we all know what happened to Tumblr.

[irthomasthomas]

According to this admin they will use rules 4 (inactive moderation) and 2 (vandalism) to drive out the mods. https://np.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/14a5lz5/mod_code...

Therefore, if mods want to retain their position, they need to poll their users for support, and then reopen the sub in a very limited capacity that continues the spirit of the protest while obeying the rules. I.e. mods are free to run the subs as they like, so they could limit posting to users with > X karma, or > Y account age. As long as the community agrees, it can't be considered vandalism.

[comprev]

The selling off of communities _dedicated_ to IP (Disney is an excellent example you give) is a genius move imho, and perhaps was part of the strategy for going IPO. Not only does Reddit slurp up more user data via official Apps, they have revenue from the IP owners.

They have the deep pockets to employ mods to keep the place clean, especially now 3rd party Mod tools are permitted - it's just the direct user-experience tools/apps which are kicked out.

I would bet the _vast_ majority of consumers don't really care about the blackouts/API changes. They just want to catch up on the latest F1 news, recent movie trailers or whatever their hobby.

[ssnistfajen]

Baidu pioneered this exact same sellout strat decades ago. Sad to see Reddit going down the same despicable path.

[amadeuspagel]

Facebook — a sinking ship with more people getting on then off: https://www.statista.com/statistics/346167/facebook-global-d...

[drumhead]

This makes good sense sadly. I suspect even fan run alternative subs will be banned out of existence for spurious reasons. It's the 80:20 principle, as long as they can keep the big subs that drive the traffic open they won't care if the smaller ones have little or no moderation.

[dbbk]

They have actually flirted with this idea. The Love Island subreddit last year was co-moderated by both volunteers and the show's social media team. But that didn't continue this year.

[waiyan13]

And /u/spez also knew it too. They are going to kill the goose for IPO. Then leave.

[prawn]

I assume they can’t have employees as mods without risking legal responsibility (S230, etc)?

[YLYvYkHeB2NRNT]

It's digg 3.0

[Varqu]

This CEO should be removed, not the moderators.

[anticensor]

That would require Reddit to voluntarily go out of business, and most companies do not do that.

[bushbaba]

What would you rather they do, go bankrupt?

Reddit is not profitable. They need a path to profitability to continue operating in a high rate environment.

[KnobbleMcKnees]

> What would you rather they do, go bankrupt?

If they're unable to build a profitable product off of the existing foundations then, yes, I absolutely want them to fail. This is how capitalism works.

> Reddit is not profitable. They need a path to profitability to continue operating in a high rate environment.

They've had over a decade to innovate their way to success just like every other tech company of that era.

From a business standpoint, they are an abject failure and don't deserve to exist if they can't hire people smart enough to monetize without alienating the entire user base.

[sanderjd]

I'm very sympathetic. Doesn't seem like alienating all the volunteer labor is the way to go though.

Without much inside info, I think what they should have done is something like: 1. Make actually-good first-party tools for moderators, 2. Figure out how to monetize everything else.

But trying to make money off of the volunteer labor is not the way to go, IMO.

It really reminds me of Twitter. Why can't these super high traffic sites where all the content is contributed for free figure out how to make money?

[wildrhythms]

Seeing as Reddit is already in the top visited sites in the US by many metrics [1] I find it somewhat hard to believe that they can't find a way to better monetize than astronomically increasing its API access.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_visited_websites

[PM_me_your_math]

Good. Let it burn. It couldn't happen to a more deserving team of sociopaths.

[codetrotter]

[flagged]

[dclowd9901]

Why do people keep bringing up Aaron Swartz around this? He was just an early developer for the site, not even part of its original creation.

[rjvir]

> Next, they'll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they're dedicated to. Eg. r/starwars to Disney, r/startrek to Viacom/Paramount, etc.

This isn't an accurate extrapolation. In fact it's extrapolating in the opposite direction.

The moderators are taking a moral stand against an API policy. But the the actual users of the subreddits never consented to this moral stand. By removing these moderators that are working against the users, reddit is giving the subreddits back to the users.

[zztop44]

Many, many subreddits held polls before deciding what to do. I know that kind of online poll is not scientific, or whatever but do you have a better idea? Not going on strike is also a moral stand that should get consent from the user base.

[deeviant]

I mod a small sub that I started many years ago, the sub users expressed overwhelming support for the 2 day private protest.

So I am interested in what numbers you are using to support your statement that users did not consent.

[sofixa]

Most subs did a poll to see what the users think, and for all those I've seen there has been overwhelming support for a blackout.