Not like the privating protests ever had much in the way of teeth anyway. The overwhelming majority of mods weren't willing to actually leave, so it was just puffery. Any mod who was on reddit during the API protests and is still there has proven they will cave to whatever rules reddit throws at them.
This is the stupid part. I left and didn't go back. I still end up there searching the odd problem online, but I don't necessarily need it. The one sub I modded, when I was last checking, has had quite a bit of spam and self-promotion "watch my new YouTube video" shit going on. I wasn't the only one doing anything on the team, as it was like 30k+ members, but it was alow traffic sub. But they don't do the weekly discussion threads, the repost bots were rampant.
All to make more money. I don't know why people stayed. All that huffing and puffing, just to cower and fold.
Privating protests definitely had some teeth in the short term, but not in the long term. In the short term, it targeted what Reddit and other social media sites value most: user retention. By privating subreddits, people would be denied access to the content they want (while being served ads), so they'd click off the website. That's why it's gone now. It's sad people are still volunteering their time for the profit of investors. I would, though, argue that privating subreddits was one of the most effective online protestings of recent history
Effective how? Reddit went through with everything they had planned. It could have been an effective form of protesting if more mods had actually been willing to leave the site or at least their modding job for good.
Peaceful protest, non peaceful or non legal protest is allowed only on the merit people decide to do it, regardless of what kind of mind games they try and use to stop it.
If this happened once, it can happen again, just in different ways.
Sh.itjustworks deleted my comments so I'm reposting them.
It also publicly noted that going NSFW (Not Safe For Work), a tool moderators used to add friction to accessing a subreddit and to make the subreddit ineligible for advertising, was “not acceptable.”
Easy solution here, post NSFW content in every sub 👍
As I mentioned in another thread, about the same link, whoever is left moderating that shithole lacks dignity and care about the userbase to do anything.
Exactly, they've only decided to cut off peaceful and legal protest, they don't get a say though in non-legal or non-peaceful protests, especially involving cyber attacks against them.
reposted because SJW (fitting name) deleted all my old ones.
I'd say that's a kinda a stretch, peaceful protests maybe, but peaceful and legal protests aren't the only type of protest as anyone who knows their history would be aware of. Violent and illegal protests are very much still possible even under this change, and they can very much hurt Reddit depending on how far they go.
Events like this could be considered a type of protest in the future, and while this one didn't do very much damage, ones which are more extreme very well could.
This shouldn't be surprising, do cyber companies think they are immune to the nasty kind of protest just because they can put artificial limits on the peaceful kind? Violent protest has happened all through history, it will no doubt continue into the cyber age, and it may get a whole lot uglier than just a few broken windows or a few cuts and scrapes.