> The shutdowns of the other subreddits were petulant moves by power mods to treat their users as pawns and hockey pucks. They were punishing their users because they were in a power struggle with the admins. That's wrong.
That's not how I observed the situation honestly. A lot of subreddit mods got flooded with "shut down"-requests and some decided against it, some followed the mass. It wasn't really a hostage-taking, the shutdown has / had widespread support among the user base.
> It wasn't really a hostage-taking, the shutdown has / had widespread support among the user base.
Don't believe this for one second. Like many others have said, it was mostly a vocal minority. /r/pics has 8+ million subscribers and you think a majority of those subscribers wanted it to be shut down?
I'm honestly surprised the mods have the power to shut down a default subreddit.
> and you think a majority of those subscribers wanted it to be shut down?
And you think it didn't? I don't see you offering up any evidence for your position other than assuming they can't have because of the sheer number.
Meanwhile we have at least some indication that there were support well beyond the moderators, in the form of heavily upvoted threads with large number of comments in support of shutdowns for many subreddits.
It's very possible that the majority didn't support the shutdowns, but that support went far beyond the moderators is a fact easily ascertained by looking at the threads.
> Meanwhile we have at least some indication that there were support well beyond the moderators, in the form of heavily upvoted threads with large number of comments in support of shutdowns for many subreddits.
To be honest, it's hard to argue either way. Going by your indication, if we look at /r/all the past week and all the submissions comparing Ellen Pao to Kim Jong-Il or Mao Zedong, would you say reddit widely supports this comparison?
Meta-observation: the fact that it's difficult to divine the intent of users on a site who'se primary claim to fame is being able to divine the intent of users suggess problems with the mechanisms in which the intent of users is divined.
Pretty much the point I'm planning on making to /u/krispykrackers the /r/modnews thread.
>The shutdowns of the other subreddits were petulant moves by power users to treat the majority of users as pawns and hockey pucks. They were punishing the majority of users because they were in a power struggle with the admins. That's wrong.
Does that fix the problems with the above sentences? Regardless of who was ultimately behind it, the shutdowns were a "I'm taking my ball and going home" move at the expense of the entire Reddit community.
Actually it was a reaction by the Reddit community to management idiocy.
As such, it was entirely justified.
You don't seem to understand how this works. Reddit does not own the community. Reddit hosts the community, and in return the community provides content for Reddit.
The community has already moved from another provider, and if Reddit carries on with more management idiocy, it will move again.
Social is littered with the crumbling ruins of corps that believed they were too big to fail, but which fell off the world after Doing Stupid Shit for too long.
You are defining the community as people who interact with the site (or maybe content creators). I am defining it as people who visit the site. The old 90-10-1 rule suggests the community how you define it is only a small subset of the community how I defined it. If someone doesn't care enough to even create an account on Reddit, what makes you think they have strong feeling about the personnel decisions of the company?
They don't necessarily have to have strong feelings about the community, but if you annoy the 9 + 1% of content creators (curators, submitters, whatever), there's nothing left for the 90% to do, and they'll move on to the next big thing out of a lack of interest.
The people who are complaining the loudest about the site's failures aren't members of the 90% of lurkers - they're members of the 9% of occasional contributors or the 1% of prolific contributors. And they're the ones that will make or break the site, so blowing them off as "not the majority" seems like a really awful idea.
I guess I was thinking of a site that the of entirety (or nearly all of) the 10/101ths of Reddit users which make up the theoretical strong feelers would move to.
As in order to attract most of them a single site would need to both be able to handle the traffic and have a broad appeal across subjects. Maintaining such a site with that much headroom for users with only their current user base to generate ad revenue I assume is problematic and I would be surprised if any single site currently could handle a mass migration like that (except maybe Tumblr which I have my doubts would appeal to this portion of the Reddit population).
So while a mass exodus could take place people would likely scatter to different sites, which might not make any single other site 'it' enough to attract the remaining masses. Or the exodus takes place over time, which I consider the likely situation, having seen the effective death of many internet communities prior to the beast which is Reddit.
If they leave over time Reddit doesn't need to ask what it should do when the 10 leaves, it needs to ask what it should do when the 10 starts to leave.( my guess would be they need to get them to stop leaving, or get others to step up and take their place as people that feel strongly about the site in its then state, or buy the site they are leaving to).
SA and Fark were both pretty big internet communities back in the prime of Slashdot. In that I remember there were quite a few friendly (and less than friendly) rivalries going between the three.
I would say any regular visitor is part of the community. There is no requirement to give back to a community in order to be a member. It is just a group of people who share a connection due to common interests or objectives.
So it's okay when reddit does it because they're a private corporation and can censor whatever they want, but when the mods of a subreddit censor themselves there's a problem?
I don't think you're correctly characterizing the subreddit shutdowns.
When someone in power silences someone else's speech or expression, then it's correctly a form of censorship, like what management did with r/fatpeoplehate. When the owners, creators or moderators of their own speech or expressions stop producing that content as what many subreddits did in response to r/iama suspending operations, purportedly not out of protest but out of a lack of understanding of a current situation, then it's protest. Censorship is a top-down use of power to silence a majority. Protest is a middle-up form of power to inconvenience a majority to apply pressure to the power holders. They aren't the same.
That's not how I observed the situation honestly. A lot of subreddit mods got flooded with "shut down"-requests and some decided against it, some followed the mass. It wasn't really a hostage-taking, the shutdown has / had widespread support among the user base.