What it says on the tin, really. I think this is going to be an issue when they get around to the smaller communities… It’s going to suck majorly, as most people’s default will remain with reddit for community discussion like this…
What it says on the tin, really. I think this is going to be an issue when they get around to the smaller communities… It’s going to suck majorly, as most people’s default will remain with reddit for community discussion like this…
Reddit is making it much more difficult for the moderators to build and maintain communities. They’re also cutting off accessible apps for using Reddit, eliminating a portion of their userbase.
Brass tacks, the community will come back (or another one will form, like r/Star_Trek or something) if people are willing to do the work. This requires them to be okay with doing unpaid labor for Reddit even while Reddit is making that labor harder. They also have to be okay with crossing a picket line.
I’m not defending reddit as a corporate entity, I “defending” its users and the community and argue against punishing them to punish reddit.
That’s a fully general argument against strikes. We shouldn’t punish Piggly-Wiggly’s customers by striking; they might not be able to get their groceries somewhere else. We shouldn’t punish drivers by striking at the auto shop; some people won’t be able to get their cars repaired.
The big difference is that r/StarTrek is nowhere near as important as a grocery store or auto shop. People need to eat to live. People need to get places. People don’t need to discuss Star Trek online at all. Much less do they need to discuss it specifically on Reddit. So the argument is more like: we shouldn’t punish customers of Sam’s Nail Salon by striking; they might have to go to Pat’s Nail Salon a couple blocks over instead, and that’s just not fair.
If you were to protest Piggly-Wiggly grocery store, you would do so by not going there and not by tampering their products or blocking people from entering the store. And your second argument can be turned around to the actual reddit protest itself, like you said reddit is not important so it is equally unimportant, technically speaking, what they are charging for their API. Fact however is, people use reddit, so we are back at the beginning. Protest is fine, put to punish users who still want to use reddit is not.
In point of fact, preventing people from entering a facility is how picketing works.
They are making moderation more expensive and more difficult. This is a labor issue. The fact that the workers are unpaid doesn’t change that. The bosses screwing over workers is not unimportant.
Same thing as if a movie theater were engaging in wage theft against their employees: wage theft is important, but you seeing a movie at that particular theater isn’t.