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I don't know how to feel about these sort of actions. On one hand, they're funny, and it's certainly making it hard for anyone to say the actions of the moderators aren't democratically decided upon. On the other hand, it's still driving engagement with the sub / site, and I rather doubt u/spez cares that people are only posting specific memes, or specific pictures, just that they're posting something and creating engagement numbers he can point to and say "See? We're open for business."
Bad look for the IPO when it's immediately obvious that a significant percentage of the users hate the management and are trying to kill the platform
I think that a lot of this recent push to monetize has surrounded the content on the site being used for AI models and big data with the intent to IPO. If all you can offer to consumers training a large language model is sexy photos of John Oliver and Olde timey speak. Then it becomes a lot less appealing as training data. I do agree that this will increase engagement, but if the alternative is hostile takeover maybe this is good?
It's certainly better than a hostile takeover, I agree with you there. I doubt a significant amount of that AI training data is coming from r/pics or r/memes, though.
From my understanding option 2 restricts the subreddit in a sense continuing the protest in a democratic fashion. You can correct me if I'm wrong
That's my understanding, too, but it looks like Option 2 is pretty far from the lead.