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Reddit Blackout Update: The Admins Strike Back.
Entering day 5 of the "48-hour" blackout in protest of the proposed API changes, many subreddits have chosen to stay private indefinitely until their demands are met. Over the last few days the admins have not-so-subtly telegraphed both on Reddit and in the media their intention to end the blackout and remove uncooperative moderators. But how? I have mentioned before Reddit's feudalistic structure which requires unpaid mods to do the dirty work of removing spam and enforcing content rules. If Reddit were to simply force open subs against the wishes of the mod team, the mods could simply revolt and refuse to work.
Well, Spez seems to have found a solution:
Feudal problems require feudal solutions. In this case, the king (Spez), is checking the power of the upper nobility (power mods) by playing them off the lower nobility and peasants (small time mods and users). This ensures a smooth transition of power, as the lower mods who will be actioning these requests have moderation experience, familiarity with the communities they will be moderating, and they will be selected specifically for their collaboration with Reddit against other unaligned forces.
In reality, this process makes itself redundant by design. The power mods behind the blackout know they've been outplayed and outgunned. Subreddits that were committed to indefinite blackout as recently as this morning are reopening, much to the embarrassment of the mod team at the hands of the community. Reddit moderators now answer directly to Spez, and they know it.
Didn't something recently happen with the mods of /r/Battletech being replaced, and people rejoicing over there because it was The Wrong Sort of people getting kicked out?
That had nothing to do with the admins. The short version of that controversy was:
A group of BattleTech fans wrote a Pride Month themed fanzine about LGBT characters in BattleTech. The mod of /r/BattleTech didn't allow links to this fanzine, feeling that it breached the sub's rules against politics. There was a revolt among users, and Catalyst Game Labs, BattleTech's current publisher, said that they disagreed with this decision and supported the fanzine. They made a new 'official' sub, /r/OfficialBattleTech. At this point the mod of /r/BattleTech reversed his decision and posted a grovelling apology, and /r/BattleTech resumed as the central sub.
(Some long-running BattleTech authors also made comments, though they seem frankly bizarre - the Warrior trilogy criticises racism, sort of, it's still a story in which the heroic English/French/German states fight a moustache-twirling Fu Manchu stereotype, but there was one sympathetic Chinese character and there was a whole subplot about how samurai are cool, but that's a different issue to the present drama. 'Woke' is a motte-and-bailey. Amusingly Stackpole himself has also been criticised as a conservative.)
This is a particularly interesting incident, I think, because BattleTech has historically been a pretty right-wing property, fitting squarely into the right-leaning milSF genre. Previous BattleTech-adjacent controversies have often been in this direction - for instance, a few years back there was some drama because MechWarrior Online allowed people to have Confederate flag decals in game, but banned someone for spamming "trans rights" at the start of every game. More infamously, one of BattleTech's flagship authors for a while was Blaine Lee Pardoe, a solid, Trump-voting conservative. It's not worth rehearsing tired personal drama (he claimed someone stalked him), but he was eventually let go and now he writes bizarre alternate history/revenge fic about a Second American Civil War. So this is an interesting example of how what was probably a relatively conservative-leaning game and community has still been really subject to the hegemony of Pride Month.
It's also rather odd because the fanzine that set the whole thing off is, well, garbage. It is genuinely not baseline competent. Setting aside all politics, it is bad even by fan fiction standards. I also find the politics of it bizarre - the Clans appear to be presented positively in it, despite being militarist eugenicist space fascists. So to me the whole thing comes off as something closer to 'rainbow fascism' than anything progressive. This is arguably consistent with the tone - the most recent BattleTech story arc, the IlClan arc, is basically pro-fascist (as in, genuinely in favour of fascism as a political ideology), but somehow they seem to have gotten away with it.
If this violates the leave-the-internet-at-the-door rule, please say so and I'll happily delete. I'm posting in spite of it because it seems relevant, but it's n=1 so no sweat if the rule comes first.
So I just got banned from my favorite Battletech discord server for very politely disagreeing (in fact, for saying no more than that I respectfully disagreed) with very severe new anti-anti-lgbt rules that even made having anything joke-like in your global pronoun field a bannable offense. Following this I was told that it was not acceptable to call for the annihilation of groups of people and that I shouldn't be a shithead, but that it was of course permissible to politely state one's opinion. I invoked that principle and stated that the language involved in the matter seemed excessively dramatic and directed at strawmen besides. I was called a troll and banned within seconds.
I'm getting similar vibes here that I got when I politely declined vaccination and suddenly half my family turned on me as if I were planning murder. People I presumed to be reasonable overtuning their reactions to benign disagreement. Other places just don't play by Motte rules.
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How on earth did people raise enough money to publish this sewer dredge?
It's not published. It's a fan work - you can download it here, if you like. That is a real quote from it.
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