fne8w2ahReddit takes control of popular subreddit that protested API changes | Engadget
It’s ridiculous to me that there are still people volunteering to moderate, Reddit had such a good deal with running mostly on free labor that is satisfied with some scraps here and there.
And what do they do? Turn the people who are sustaining their business and ask for nothing in return hostile towards them over some penny pinching.
OctaviusI was surprised as well but after watching some streamers doing r/place I learned that there are quite a lot of users who never used 3rd party apps and weren’t really touched by all the protests… The amount of questions “who is u/Spez” in the chat was also quite high. So they might have driven away a large chunk of the power users. But the remaining and the regular users are enough to keep it running I guess. As sad as this is.
I had a friend of a friend who worked at Wizards of the Coast, and it’s a revolving door there. There’s no shortage of people eager to work on games that mean so much to them, so it’s easy to abuser workers and cut the loose if there’s any hint that they might start demanding better treatment, or a better direction for the brands, or especially organizing and collectively bargaining.
It’s kind of the same thing here. There’s no shortage of servile users eager to be scabs. It’s going to lead to stifling and unpleasant communities in the long run, but they don’t really care. So long as they can slow down the appearance of enshittification, and keep reddit.com from being full of reasons why the site is a bad investment, they can cash out in the IPO and leave investors holding the bag.