Antiwork was forced to reopen by the admins

You gotta appreciate the irony of Reddit demanding free labor from mods of a sub that is about labor abuse.

More ironic that the mod team agreed.
- They should reopen and just stop doing any moderation beyond the bare minimum to keep the sub.
It baffles me that they even used the word "expectations." Like... 'ma'am... I am not being paid. Do not have ANY expectations.'
The longer this goes the more it reads like the onion.

The utter irony of r/AntiWork being forced to reopen is astounding. Strike broken. Union busted. It's over.

they are toast, forcing these open will not save them long term. the fact that they had to go here shows how effective this has really been.
no one expect them to close doors tomorrow, and I still think they IPO, lots of dumpster fires IPO. Will still be a dumpster fire and at some point it will be "huh, you still go to that trash site"?
Its happened to ever corp social network.
- I think you hit on one of the key points. Every other time this same pattern has played out, each of those sites becomes a shadow of what they once were, but the continue because (to be blunt) running Internet sites is CHEAP.
I wonder why they’re forcing open not particularly advertiser friendly subs like piracy and antiwork?
- Possibly conspiratorial thinking on my part, but the first reason I can think of is that those subs are both popular enough that they wouldn't want them fully migrating off reddit/closed forever, but also the kind of sub to not go along with unpopular decisions/ cause trouble. If you were looking to force a few subs open to serve as an example to mods of other subs that they must reopen or be replaced, you'd want to choose ones that aren't as likely to reopen on their own anyway after awhile, and who's moderation team you might want to replace, as you now have an excuse and the people who would get mad already are.
- I wonder if it’s because they know the first few subs to be forced open will make headlines, but the second batch most likely won’t. So by starting with fringe subs it paints the picture that’s it’s not the bigger or more important subs that are participating in the blackout.
  I wouldn’t be surprised to see the /r/antiwork mod’s disastrous appearance on Fox News become a talking point again paired with this, so that when people hear “Reddit forces mods to…” that’s the sort of person the public pictures.
that may not be a wasps nest they want to be poking.

We – the so-called "landed gentry" – appreciate that Reddit is made great by its users. Uncompensated contributors populate the platform's many communities with their content, just as volunteer moderators keep spam and bigotry at bay. Since neither we nor Reddit would be here without you, it was only fair to let you determine what /r/Pics should include... and you overwhelmingly chose to feature only images of John Oliver looking sexy. (Seriously, the final vote was -2,329 to 37,331.)

As such, /r/Pics will henceforth feature only images of John Oliver looking sexy.

It's great, have a scroll. No intent to derail, here's the thread on !reddit@lemmy.ml: https://lemmy.world/post/206467

I wonder if a similar stunt would have been possible for /r/antiwork. Any ideas? How about: "You must rest on weekdays. Posts and comments are only allowed on weekends."

I like your idea, but also combine it with the idea behind CatsStandingUp, but each post must be the exact same image, with the exact same title. Make it as boring as possible.
To add extra spice: Everyone who posts or comments gets automatically banned by automod, as participation is working and against community ideals. I have no idea if that breaks any site rules, but it would discourage participation.
- Everyone who posts or comments gets automatically banned by automod, as participation is working and against community ideals.
  So good :D
That’s brilliant, hope to see Reddit turn into nothing but a slew of super-specific protest posts.
- You'll love what r/steam did. They were forced open and from what I hear users are now exclusively posting pictures of water vapor.
- I want /r/ music to ban all music except covers of ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ or maybe ‘My Heart Will Go On’.
- Should we be brigading it with spam and trash to reduce it's worth?
You made me go to reddit for a quick look, and I'm in love with it. John Oliver is indeed a sexy beast.
Upload only pictures of not doing work
I hate to be a party pooper, but I really can't see how the subreddits doing things like that are in any way a protest.
I highly doubt Reddit cares what anyone is posting pictures of as long as they are legal, and the engagement is high. The only way to post them is to engage with Reddit, whether on their website, through the official app, or through a third party app that has to pay Reddit money to use the API. That's exactly what Reddit wants.
And as for the mods: in a real life scenario, I can see how the threat of being replaced is scary because it means losing your income... but here? They were doing free labour, and as soon as Reddit threatened to take away their power over a corner of the internet, they immediately gave in and proceeded to encourage their audience to "protest" by engaging with Reddit.
I think it would have been several times more effective if the mods just all quit, and everyone who is "protesting" by engaging with Reddit in one form or another (posting, commenting, or just looking and upvoting) just left. I really doubt Reddit is even worried about what is happening now.
- imo the novelty of john oliver will wear off soon, and people will want regular content again. so long as mods stay firm that regular content is not allowed, users will be dissatisfied and lower their engagement. though it’s not a perfect plan (people could just use different subs), it’s better than nothing
- people go to reddit for the content. if the content isn't on reddit anymore, they will end up elsewhere. filling reddit up with content that nobody really cares about will dissuade people from using reddit.
- I think the point is this dissuades lurkers, as it's boring.
- I really think the point is that posting useless content that actively protests the platform and makes it less valuable and interesting should make it hard for Reddit to show investors that their platform is worth money as they go public, which is why the whole thing started in the first place.

I’m not and never have been a mod. But can understand the conflict of not wanting to reopen but if you don’t you lose a position that you’ve spent a lot of time and energy. They’re probably passionate about their community. Giving that away and seeing someone else destroy all your hard work? Glad I’m not that invested.
- It's called the sunk cost fallacy. "I can't possibly quit because I've put so much time/money/effort into this."
- Not only that but handing over the sub to people who might be power-hungry and/or abusive. Hard to see a community you've worked for be taken over by those who don't care about it.
- Don't forget the addiction to power. Yes, there are all kinds of moderators.
- The mods are literally doing work for free. Reddit won't find competent volunteers, so leaving is the only reasonable choice for anyone with any amount of integrity.

It's like, come on AntiWork, you had one job. Or none job. You know what I mean.

Why don't they move here? They are being exploited there anyways

And give up their power as mods of a large subreddit and starting again from scratch? Most of them probably aren't willing to do that.
- I'm a mod of /r/Disneyland, and we recreated our sub over here on Kbin ( @Disneyland, https://kbin.social/m/Disneyland).
  The issue is that we had 500k subs on Reddit. That sounds like a lot, but in reality it equates to about a dozen posts a day, maybe less.
  Over here on Kbin, we almost have 100 subs - and I'm really proud of that! - but 100 subs is basically nothing. A fraction of a percent of people are actually content contributors, and the whole community rests on them. Then combine that with the fact that we're a niche subject (not some general thing like "video games") and that impacts what can be contributed.
  On top of that, the magazine is fairly empty. Not barren - we have a few posts - but it certainly looks and feels empty. And because it's empty, nobody wants to post, which means it stays empty.
  Compare that to Reddit, which has a very dedicated community for us. Not a massive community, but certainly a passionate one. We care about our community; we've stewarded it for years. All of us mods started out as members of that community (the subreddit founder is long gone), and we're all unpaid volunteers that want to keep that community healthy.
  Reddit threatened to take it from us and give it to another mod team for a related Disney subreddit that played along with the admins. The issue is that multiple Disney subreddits have, uh, issues with those mods (which has been the case for years to the point where explaining the history is part of onboarding for a lot of Disney mods).
  So the issue was reframed - either we reopen our sub on our terms... or we stick to our guns, force Reddit to remove us, and get replaced by a different mod team. This other team is known to be harsh about banning users for any kind of dissent, they abuse their mod powers to spread anti-vax nonsense all over their "non-political" subreddit, they have multiple subreddit drama threads talking about their actions, they've been gunning for all of the Disney subs for years... and they'd immediately jump at the chance to reopen the subreddit we've worked hard on so they could run it their way.
  When you look at it like that... there's only one real choice. I hate Reddit, but our community doesn't deserve that.
  I realize saying "we choose to keep our powers for your own good" makes me sound like, oh, I dunno, "landed gentry"... but users don't see that side of moderation or Reddit drama, and frankly they shouldn't have to.
  So we opened and are taking the abuse. Users are torn between "you caved, scabs" and "told you this was a useless gesture, how dare you take my sub away". Neither one is great.
  But there's more to it than what appears on the surface, and frankly that's true across a lot of subs.
- I still think Reddit forcibly removing the head mod of r/Piracy is peak irony. They can't not have people discussing copyright infringement, even through in years prior they were threatening to ban the community.
- Reddit is destroying their moderation tools anyway...
Sounds like a lot of work. And that’s not really their thing
- Its really only a little bit of work, with significant rewards.
  Still not their thing.

They were not forced, they were pressured. The mods caved to the threat of being replaced, showing everyone that having that little bit of power was always their main priority. I didn't expect more from dog-walkers.

Yes everyone against labor abuse is a dog walker basement dweller.
- Not everyone, but those mods definitely are.
- One of their mods literally was a 20 hour work week dog walker who wanted to work less.
- If they really were anti-work and pro-sticking-it-to-the-man, they'd leave Reddit rather than cave to spez's demands.
- No, just the ones on antiwork
- What on earth do ya'll have against dog walkers? I've never seen this as an insult before.
  The only professional dog walker I've known was a really shitty manager in a powerful position, too, hardly an antiwork guy.
Right, but what’s their alternative? While they’re still mods they can still affect some level of change. If they completely cede to Reddit’s admin, they have nothing.
- While they’re still mods they can still affect some level of change.
  If they can't endure even a 1 week strike on a social network then they cannot affect any change anyway because they are a completely powerless farce. Imagine how quickly they'd fold if this were a RL thing with actual consequences beyond their moderator position.
  I mean have we forgotten when last year the mod of that sub went to a live interview and the whole subreddit was so ashamed they had to distance themselves from it? I think the day later they said nobody will interview anymore and they removed the person as a mod and wiped any trace of it? They are a joke, this is just another event that proves it.

Antiwork mods should quiet quit. Sit back and let the house burn down.

Unreal stuff. It looks like spez thinks the PR cannot get any worse so he may as well go full scorched earth.

If that's the case, he wouldn't be wrong. I mean, he should just do whatever he's thinking and get it over with. The users and mods are pissed, all goodwill has been spent.

Irony

oh, the irony

Mods are forced to work

Nah it's just power addiction. They can stop any time.
- You keep repeating that. Just how many times have you been banned on Reddit? I'm guessing a lot.

Pretty sure most of the more anarchist mods got pushed out sometime after the whole Fox News debacle already and since then the content has become less spicy too. Watering all that down again, what is even left? "Please master spez I would like to slightly criticise a corporation, am I allowed to do this or is it against the guidelines and duties of moderators?" or what.

Well, it is all for the best, free thinking people will migrate and rebuild, the rest I won‘t miss.

After the fox news thing, the sane ones split and left for r/workreform. Which is a more reasonable community whose tone was, "we don't mind working but we want to be fairly treated, and the best way to assure that is through unionizing or leaving for better jobs". None of that "I literally think no one should work and someone else should pay all of our bills" crap.
99% of what made it to /all from there was pretty much "I hate my manager"
- I enjoyed the underlying anarchist texts to the movement like Bullshit Jobs by Graeber, The Abolition of Work by Bob Black etc. but yeah discussion of that was minimal and the more people arrived the less there was and I‘m also sure none of that ever made it to r/all.
  Ironically, I have a great manager and wonderful job, I just dislike the system as a whole due to a) people around me suffering b) bad experiences growing up I been exploited with internships as somewhat of a cleaner. Thus I like our cleaners more than the CEO and if I were in charge I‘d pay them better too.
  Anyway, the biggest advocates for r/antiwork in my mind aren‘t some mods, it‘s actually people like Musk or spez who can‘t help but treat anyone working class like trash and rabble. They push this mentality of everyone should kiss their feet or they deserve to become homeless. As long as they are around, such a movement will persist. I mean it even exists in supposedly-communist China with tang ping and they try to censor it a lot harder, haha good luck! Either they treat people well and foster a positive and engaging work culture or a counterculture arises naturally.
  Sorry, now I went off on a tangent all just from this little comment!
Man I miss the old antiwork sub. Peeps back then understood what work meant as a material condition that needs to be abolished.

Federation isn't like email at all. I don't know why people keep saying that. You'll never get a message saying "we're not receiving email from this server today" unless something has gone horribly wrong.

Email also doesn't hang with a green loading circle for hours when you try to log in.

No, that was pretty much how email worked for a long time. And IRC.
I remember someone even making a song "I am going to ban your domain" to the tune of "they're coming to take me away" to mock sysadmins who took this drastic measure too quickly.
Some university servers would block all email from abroad except for some whitelisted servers. My school blocked emails from another school because the students were badly policed and would just harrass other schools.
Some domains were universally blockdd because they were used by spammers and scammers.
This mostly softened into spam folders and increasingly sophisticated filtering, which is dominating today.
There are blacklisted email servers. And when email started you had loading circle for the whole internet.
I think others are noting how it can be like this. In my experience:
My kids' school accounts can only send emails to and receive emails from their teachers' email addresses. All other emails, including those from fellow students, are blocked.
I frequently have issues with whitelisted email addresses at work. They sometimes are blocked and I have to go through the tedious whitelisting process all over again.
Spam filtering on email is defederation. It’s just in the background and isn’t talked much about because it’s been automated quite a lot. But at the end of the day it’s still writing domain names into blacklist, essentially defederating from those domains.
Email has the same problems as federated lemmy servers.
Mail Servers can end up on distrubuted blacklists and unable to communicate with each other. When office 365 has an outage it causes huge problems because it's a single large provider having issues. That provider goes down but not email as a whole.
This is the same as what happened about a week ago when lemmy.ml and lemmy.world went down due to load.
As someone who runs multiple email servers, this is exactly how it works.
Some email providers will randomly or purposely block emails I sent to them. I get arbitrary blocks or dropped emails on sent emails.
I'm more seeing it as tiny villages in the same country. Sometimes there's a duplicate Starbucks over in the other village, but they might have a different daily special. And some villages have beef with eachother, and then you gotta sneak out if you still want to secretly visit your beloved in the other village. Or move over to your summer house in village #3, where you can both meet up without issues.
Smaller domains are blocked all the time, ask your local email admin.... just because you're not getting messages about it doesn't mean it doesn't happen
gmail and outlook and yahoo just silently drop my emails so I don't even get the courtesy of a notification, and it's almost impossible to get it appealed. The server issues will be fixed with time, reddit used to crash all the time.

I’ve heard about some subs being forced back open, but I wasn’t entirely sure if that’s what’s really happening.

This is truly sad. No matter how you protest, the house always wins in this game. Even though this blackout was doomed from the start, at least now Reddit has shown their hand. Now it’s clear that I want absolutely nothing to do wit that corporation ever again.

Are we missing an equivalent anti work community on kbin? I'd like that

!antiwork@lemmy.ml

Another weird choice for a sub to force open. Are we sure this is legit?

r/gaming has mentioned receiving similar threats, so it might be that more are getting them but by and large only the "edgier" (not meant derogatorily, just can't think of a better term for it) subreddits going public about it?

@Whitt oh. no. oh. no. pls. no. no. stop. an adult stepped in and mods put in their place. and the sky is blue. news at 11.

"put in their place"?
To me that has always seemed to talk from people that felt the need to punish people for not pandering to their ego.
- As did my great uncle pass down his wisdom from the early nineties IRC flame wars, "~~ASL~~ " don't feed the trolls".
- This is why the correct response is, "maybe somebody needs to put you in your place, whuddaya think about that, wiseguy?"
- If the community wanted it, nothing wrong with the moderators capitulating to the community. Reddit gets the moderation quality they pay for, and they're paying their moderators negative money, with how things have been going. They can pony up if they want better moderation.
  What are they supposed to do, run roughshod all over their users?
Troll gonna troll.
If the adult is the wife beater, sure..
There is nothing adult about how reddit is behaving. It's actually very childish and immature.
Mods are not valued or respected by reddit whatsoever, despite working for free and caring about the quality of the community.
But I'm glad it's playing out in the open. Reddit will be an even bigger shit platform from now on.
To me it's fine. I don't have to use reddit. :)
I've been wondering, how do spez's boots taste?