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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.
I nuked my entire 9 year account last week. Wiped all my posts, nearly 5,000, and deleted. Reddit really lost the plot. Shame.
There are reports that Reddit is un-deleting comments that people have deleted. You might want to check if that actually worked or not.
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Interesting. I'll do that. Even with the software I used the gold ones stayed, but I manually wiped those as well just out of spite.
edit： Yes a few are still there though [deleted] shows as author. Odd that tge search engine for my username (same as here) nevertheless turned up the posts.
No recourse, as my acct which could redelete them is gone. Thanks for telling me, though.
Its likely too late but https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite is a great tool. I wipe my reddit posts and close my accounts there every 6 months or so. This tool doesn't just delete them, though it can, it actually edits them first. I've mine set to edit the post to a single period (.) then delete it, so if they are restored it restores the (.)
Brilliant. Yes, that is the best way if one is intent on deletion. I was unaware it could be done en masse. I have an alt or two that I may decide to also wipe, so I will keep this in mind, thank you. There were a lot of little pieces of me floating around on reddit, and although it doesn't pain me as much as I might have thought it would to wipe those pieces from history, I do feel it's somehow a shame. But my disillusionment with reddit has now as much to do with its active userbase as the results of its admin decisions.
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