BrikoXReddit communities adopt alternative forms of protest as the company threats action on moderators
saigotI think this is the death knoll for the protest unfortunately. Shitposting hurts the user experience, but it doesn't really hurt reddit. In a week or two the casual users will revolt against the protests and the mods will feel like they have lost popular support and cave.
Hopefully enough people have fully left the platform to cause reddit some pain. But honestly I think reddit would rather have a smaller easier to manipulate user base of new users rather than keeping all the oldest and most cynical users.
It does hurt Reddit, the user experience is what keeps people browsing it. If the user experience deteriorates, so does engagement.
But right now it’s bringing eyeballs to see the spectacle. To be effective these need to persist long past the point where it isn’t “fun” anymore.
Spez likely is looking at this and seeing:
Edit: just to make it clear I’m not saying I think this is fine for Reddit long term. I’ve just had this conversation with too many MBAs to not know this is how they’d look at all of this.
I suppose the only caveat to that is the fact that mods are unpaid volunteers, if they all downed tools it would take both time and costly resource to replace them which would hurt the bottom line when theyve been reliant on unpaid labour for so long.