Reddit typically bans unmoderated subreddits. For any larger ones that would impact revenue, they'll just push in new mods.
Doesn't it usually take them a while to figure out it's unmoderated? Even longer if it's badly moderated?
On a few of the tiny subs I modded on, we'd just approve everything by default unless someone reported it, or it was like, illegal content (cp, etc.).
The average user won't know what's happening, they'll just think "Wow, what's with all this spam, mods need to do their jobs."
What needs to happen is people migrate from Reddit to alternatives like Lemmy, or at the very least, the Reddit admins think enough people are going to leave Reddit. Filling your sub with spam won't make people switch to Lemmy, they'll just go to one of the remaining subs that's still being moderated.
By stepping down in moderating and letting it get crappy, it will induce more people to leave, thinking "this sub has gone to shit"
It'll get people to leave certain subreddits, but the average Redditor still doesn't know enough about other sites like Lemmy to even really think about making a switch.
If r/gaming, for example, stops moderating and goes to shit, people will go "Wow this sub sucks now, I'm gonna browse r/games or r/gaming2 or whatever." But if r/gaming blacks out, and most importantly posts a message with a link to [email protected] that says "The community is going here, please join us," that will at least get some people to move.
the thing that did happen with digg that didn't happen with heaps of other websites was a negatively received UI change. people hated it.
now, people deliberately don't use the reddit mobile app because it fucking sucks, and closing down the alternatives is a negative UI change ...
exactly, I can't even go back to the official reddit app because it's so shit.
It's almost impressive that they can take something that works and make it absolute ass
Reddit would ban it, probably another, more reddit friendly team would take over...
What they can do is a poor job.
What we need is a group of “hackers” like lizard squad back in the day (yes the dumb hacker trend we had) to DOS or spam threads with bots. Or DOS reddit mods and admins of larger useless subs that arent considered critical resources for important real life shit.
Yes im condoning dumb shit that got old over 10 years ago, but at this point… does it matter?? May aswell just be dicks with it.