I have to imagine there are more than a couple reddit staff who are supremely annoyed/pissed about this whole mess. They probably work at reddit because they love it and now they have to oversee it being turned to shit.
The people running most large things, like reddit or countries, are idiots because people with half a brain are smart enough to see that that's not a position you want to put yourself in. Anyone who can see the enormity of the responsibility nope out a lot sooner than reaching that level of governance, and the idiots who can't see filter through.
I'm still struggling to believe that they've taken the wrong turn at every point.
When this whole thing happened I figured they'd soften their stance a bit, only to go back on it months or years later and essentially boil the frog slowly.
I figured I'd just move to the official app, not that big a deal, especially if they improve it.
Yet 2 weeks later I've deleted reddit and running Jerboa now, the way the community rallied is nothing short of incredible and I'm really proud to be here.
Never underestimate the power of greed and stupidity. They can handle this worse. The NSFW subreddits are difficult if not impossible to monetise. Reddit is also one of the biggest providers of porn on the Internet.
It'll be interesting how they resolve this conflict. I suspect that's when handling it worse will kick in.
If nothing else, this proves that Reddit admins don't fundamentally understand the platform. They may understand the back-end, and how to interact with ad servers to monetize content, but they don't understand how to effectively moderate communities. it never occured to them that they would need to scrub all the NSFW content before removing the tag?
In some places, that may even be illegal. And the Reddit admins have no one but themselves to blame, because they're the one that removed the tag without due diligence.
I've given up all hope for Reddit as a platform now. Mods should give up, too, and resign en masse. The Admins may be able to assign a few dozen of the largest subs to those power mods who are already favored by the Royal Court, but If this is any indication they have no way to maintain all of Reddit without the unpaid volunteer community they are shitting on.
Is it though? It kind of feels like you broke up with someone but are still getting constant updates about who they're currently fucking the minute you left.
It's more like watching them post about how bad a date went or hearing about how they got kicked out of Wendy's.
I haven't subbed to any reddit related magazines/communities here but they pop up on all. I do think it's probably healthier for people and this platform to move on. I do get why people still want to hear about shenanigans.
They should tell this story to news oultlets, I bet many of them would be happy to publish it, The Verge comes to mind, they've been pretty accurate so far in covering the protest.
Some subs went to allow NSFW (and porn) as protest, as you said, and reddit admins disabled the NSFW tag on those subs which decided to allow porn and become NSFW.
It sounds like they're just removing the NSFW tag site-wide instead of using the manpower to manually check each sub to see if it was NSFW before the protests.
What a fucking fumble, using the iron fist approach on the people who supply and moderate literally all of their content for free surely won't have any repercussions.
To add to that, if a sub is tagged as nsfw, there are no ads (to not scare of advertisers).
Some sub mods indirectly invited users to post porn, so they became nsfw subs by protest.
Without defending the reddit admins as they seem to go bonkers atm but I am genuinely interested if there is any possibility to verify for us any claims made?
There are screenshots of the mod log showing the "Moderator Code of Conduct" admin account going in and reverting the NSFW settings on multiple subs. Yeah screenshots aren't always trustworthy but that's really the best you're going to get with this. It's not out of character for Spez though, so I'm not giving Reddit the benefit of the doubt.
I knew this would happen as soon as some sub went NSFW to protest and i still hate that it happened like WTF do they even check what they're doing or do they just don't care anymore cause even greedy bastards should know how stupid this is.
Edit: Now that i've calmed down which subs were affected by this change?