Minecraft's devs exit its 7 million-strong subreddit after Reddit's ham-fisted crackdown on protest
Minecraft's devs exit its 7 million-strong subreddit after Reddit's ham-fisted crackdown on protest
The Minecraft subreddit won't be a source for official Mojang communications going forward.
I’m starting to think Spez isn’t the brightest bulb in the box
And it's not like this is some small indie game anymore... If Mojang thinks it's right to back out with the best selling game of all time, why won't other devs back out of Reddit?
I think he took money from some people who really really want an IPO to cash out.
They’re doing the right thing in this case for sure.
Not having one of your official update/news mediums being fundamentally changed in how you and your customers interact with each other by a hostile third party is a good thing.
Shoving things onto twitter/discord/facebook wouldn’t be a good alternative either.
This is what happens when you make companies and organizations afraid that you're just going to take away official communication channels from them. It's the only logical action for then
That and the devs are reddit users. I have a feeling this whole thing pushed them too much
I feel as if this is the first real sign that this shit has had an impact. Minecraft isn't a small community by any means, and them ditching the huge subreddit over this is shocking.
It makes sense from a perspective that their jobs just got a lot harder, they don't have any of the tools they used to, they are being threaten with termination if they don't volunteer their free time.
Why would anyone want to do that hobby?
Wow, definitely the biggest users to exit the platform
Glad to see it 💪 Fuck Spez
But they quit without replacement? https://feedback.minecraft.net is not a replacement for a community
Seems more like a cost cutting measure (mods are paid by microsoft) than a protest. Some manager saw the opportunity to blame an unpopular decision to someone else?
I really don’t think it’s a protest on the part of Minecraft anyway; what they were really saying is that because subs were no longer enforcing rules and content moderation wasn’t happening anymore (or was being actively discouraged) and porn among other things was becoming more prevalent on the site, they didn’t feel comfortable having an official affiliation with Reddit, even if it was only with one sub.
The protest worked in a way, but I wouldn’t give Microsoft credit for actually backing the protests.
I give them tons of credit for this! With Twitter becoming, in my opinion, basically a Nazi echo chamber, the corporate brands and public personalities staying on the platform basically lends it legitimacy. It says "it's normal to hang out in public places where hate groups thrive and are encouraged". Microsoft making this choice is sending a public message that Reddit's conduct is making the place unsafe - that it's not perfectly normal to hang out in the subreddit that are lacking moderation.
It's not necessarily a perfect comparison because I think Twitter's leadership is directly doing things to promote harmful and hateful content, whereas reddit I think is just hurting it's relationship with its own community, but the throughline is the lack of moderation making the content more extreme.
This was my first thought too, it's definitely what their language was indicating.
I’ve been looking for this kind of comment, because this was my first thought on reading the statement. Very PR speak implying that the state of subs like r/interestingasfuck meant that they didn’t want the brand risk that now comes with being on Reddit – not that they cared about or were protesting the API changes.
I do think it’s interesting because it shows that the mod protests on those subreddits - even if brief - triggered a big enough brand risk moment for MSFT/Minecraft to decide dropping Reddit completely (rather than temporarily or similar) was worth it. I don’t think we’ve seen any other brands officially do that yet.
Pretty sure they could afford a few mods salary.