[Donald]

Reddit is very bizarre right now.

Most of the active users are non-power users who are flummoxed at why mods have shut down their favorite subreddits. They are complaining in droves. Lots of long-winded Facebook boomer-style rants about how they read the subreddit with their kids and they need it back up to entertain them.

Some subs are protesting the spez moderator removal threat by changing the topic of the sub entirely.

Meanwhile, most of the content producers seem to have fled the site and latest high quality serious content is a week old at this point.

I don’t see how Reddit recovers from this without losing a great deal of value for their shareholders. I’m expecting Huffman to resign based on how much he has damaged their monetization potential with advertisers.

[kitsunesoba]

Loss of the primary content creators is serious, more than I think most realize. Without active serious creators you end up with nothing but an endless feed of endlessly recycled memes. Reddit was already trending that direction anyway with repost bots posting almost as much as real users, and creators leaving will only accelerate the process.

[satvikpendem]

> Without active serious creators you end up with nothing but an endless feed of endlessly recycled memes.

This is what drives the most eyeballs to ads though. Reddit simply wants to be like Instagram with memes, not an actual text-based discussion forum.

[satvikpendem]

> Meanwhile, most of the content producers seem to have fled the site and latest high quality serious content is a week old at this point.

I highly doubt this, most content producers explicitly can't post their content because their subs are restricted or private, eg AskHistorians.

> I don’t see how Reddit recovers from this without losing a great deal of value for their shareholders. I’m expecting Huffman to resign based on how much he has damaged their monetization potential with advertisers.

No, this is great for shareholders as it explicitly removes users using apps that are not able to show Reddit ads.

[ramraj07]

I’m an avid Redditor and have been for a decade. I just stopped using it since the blackout. Turns out life is fine without it. Occasionally I go into it when I have a specific question or something but that’s it. Screw that site and these myopic CEOs who think they’re Elon Musk 2.0. I doubt I’m the only big contributor to do this. Whether the subs come back or not, I give Reddit a mere 50% chance of being able to survive this long term. Eat this shareholders, for leaving an idiot on as CEO.

[mardifoufs]

Users being mad at mods that think that they own communities that aren't theirs? Shocking! What a bunch of boomers, they should just let the mods get their powertrip! It's not like they are volunteers that could just... Go away if they dont want to moderate the community anymore.

(Again, moderators do not own the subreddits, they can't unilaterally close it. I mean, they can, but they can't be surprised if they lose mod rights. The funny thing is that they are all reopening now that they might actually lose their little fiefdom. Random readers being affected didn't matter to them, but once there was even a hint that they could lose their online janitor status they quickly caved in. Very very selfless)

[majewsky]

> Users being mad at mods that think that they own communities that aren't theirs?

This is one of these places where the concept of "ownership" falls apart, at least in the monolithic ownership. A community consists of users, mods, and the platform operator. As soon as one of these components defects, the community is destroyed. So really the community as an entity can only exist when all three sides cooperate, which makes the question of who owns it somewhere between unhelpful and nonsensical.