Reddit mods, face the music. Your volunteer work is only going to get harder and even more thankless from here. Quit while you’re up.
I understand people’s attachment to their community, but if even a significant minority of those who went dark mass resigned on the 30th, it would’ve had so much bigger an impact than any of the ongoing attempts at protest.
I am surprised roughly a quarter of the protesting communities have stayed dark. That’s way more than I expected out of a two day protest. It’s no mass resignation, but it is more effective than most of the follow up protests.
To me, it appears that the ongoing follow up protests keep the power-admins’ hands full from reopening the smaller privated subreddits.
Absolutely will cause a lot more spam to go through. But why is that the custom written moderators tool/bot fault? Why isn’t Reddit the company doing more to stop or combat spam/bots? Why keep doing their job for them, for free?? If it’s so damn useful (and BotDefense is), then Reddit should be doing it, or I don’t know pay for that service?!
Because … You can say to tech illiterate investors: "hey look, look at all the activity that goes on in my site"with not much scrutiny and inflate those rookie numbers up.
There is no much incentive, in the capitalists sense, to deter spam or trolls, fear mongering and explosive comments, clickbait journalism, etc etc etc … for owners of any online outlet, it’s all in the service of ever growing traffic.
Dilution will kill Reddit. Wait until the AI scraping gets into a feedback loop with AI posting.
The botting and astroturfing was already out of control. It’s going to be so much worse going forward.
The cynical part of me wants to say that’s by design. That reddit wants to get rid of good moderation tools so that it can allow more paid astroturfung to get more revenue.
Enshittification stage 3.
Reddit started as a service based on fake users and activity to attract real users, it’s going to end as bots talking to bots.