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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.
In the real world, the house nearly always wins. The scrappy upstarts gets brutally beaten down and possibly destroyed. Hollywood has destroyed so many lives by feeding people false fantasies during their childhoods (often with parents helping to pile on) as people later become confronted with life as it is rather than an idealised version that never existed.
This reddit drama is just a microcosm of that. It's also a gentle reminder that much of our actual lives are essentially hyperauthoritarian with basically zero democracy. A lot of anarchist theorists have noted this in the past when analysing our modern liberal capitalist systems, but it's nice to get another confirmation with this entire saga. Ultimately the only voices that actually matter can be counted on a single hand. That is true in almost all large organisms, ranging from large communities, corporations to even nation-states.
If Reddit's userbase actually for the most part supported the protests then I think Spez would probably have to fold. But I think that the userbase does not. Most Redditors either do not care about the protests or they hate the mods more than they hate Reddit the company. The protesting mods tried to launch a revolution in a community where most people do not support them and so they got crushed. This does not necessarily mean that there is no democracy there, it just means that the people do not want the blackouts.
The new /r/nba and /r/nfl threads about the re-openings are mostly made up of people who are expressing not just disagreement with the mods, but who are actively mocking and deriding the mods. Given what mods are usually like, this is not surprising. Some would argue that the people who support the mods are just not participating in those threads, but I doubt that this is a significant factor. Many of the mods themselves could not stop themselves from participating in Reddit during the blackouts. I doubt that their supporters are much different.
It might have made more sense for the mods to switch to work-to-rule instead of the 48 hour lock out. One of their main objections was that without API access via third party apps their work would be made harder, so show what the effects would be by modding using only the Reddit app. Submissions take longer to get approved, spam slips through, reports go unmodded, trolls go unchecked, duplicate posts proliferate, custom scripts stop posting whatever special features the subs use them for, admins get more tickets from mods asking for support and missing features, and the invisible janitor work begins to become more visible in its absence. If mod work is valuable and the Reddit app makes mod work less effective the result ought to be that Reddit gets worse. What's Reddit going to do, complain that they got what they wanted?
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