this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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The subreddits are created, moderated, populated, and maintained by volunteers. The company’s model is fundamentally not under their own control, which is a knife that cuts both ways. Calling it a hijacking when it was never under anyone else’s control is not just wrong, it’s actually entirely backwards. Reddit is the one hijacking the subreddits.
That's like saying Facebook's model is not fundamentally under its own control. The same with Twitter, or any other social media.
Reddit owns the servers which host the subreddits.
Preventing users from accessing your subreddit, as a moderater (who is also not an employee of the company), as a form of protest, is a means of trying to control the website's overall behavior.
So, yes, it is a high jacking attempt. Not an effective one, but one nonetheless.
Giant subs have shut down before, yet Reddit never reopened them prior to June 2023. It was the coordinated action across subs that Reddit saw as a threat, not the act of closing a sub (which had never been against the rules and still isn’t). Reddit saw the protest as hijacking in the same way that other companies feel that the workers are hijacking the company when they try to unionize or strike. Only difference here is that the workers for this company are volunteers rather than paid employees.
Sure, reddit’s a private company, so they can mostly do whatever they want, but that doesn’t change the fact that these actions are unprecedented and a huge betrayal of trust, and there’s nothing wrong with people (especially those that invested a lot of time and effort into building the site into what it is today) being upset at reddit for this.
I agree with you.
I had been using Reddit for a long time, so I understand.
I don't think the blackout was productive: it was never going to change their minds, they just didn't want to have give moderators the boot in the end.
Nah, it didn’t have to end like that. There was another way they could have played it, but they chose not to. There’s no reason to act as if it was inevitable.