Reddit Migration

Seriously. He has to be one of the dumbest CEOs in the history of the world.

It "makes sense" if you view Reddit by looking only at the total number of Reddit users and not considering differing levels of engagement. If you've got tens of millions of people subscribed to a sub, it's easy to let your ego take the wheel and say, "Fuck 'em! So what if we lose a million users? We've got plenty more!"

It doesn't make sense if you realize that the "users" most likely to be alienated by your actions are the moderators and regular contributors whose participation creates the community of that subreddit. You've got the mods, who handle the bombthrowers, and the regular contributors who shape the sub in their own way by being mostly on-topic and mostly helpful. They're often the ones who throw the ball back into the ring before the mods have to step in, and some of them are pretty entertaining, too.

IMO, Reddit is likely to lose a disproportionate share of mods and power users and spez doesn't get that. I think he believes all users are fungible, and they're not. He thinks he can tough this out and things will blow over. He's wrong. Reddit won't disappear, any more than Twitter has, but I sure as hell wouldn't buy stock when the IPO happens. If it happens.

He no doubt has a golden parachute contract that means he'll make bank regardless of what happens. Either the IPO is successful, and he gets money, or reddit fires him (and lays all the blame on him) and he gets money.

Voting out mods is a TERRIBLE idea. It means a very active minority can effectively control a large subreddit, and politically oriented / minority spaces are going to have constant campaigns trying to take them over.

Can you imagine what it's going to be like moderating TwoX, lgbt, or egg_irl if this change goes through? What a nightmare.

Spez has been un-deleting people's posts, forcibly resubscribing them to large subs that they left, and sending out a warning that says "are you sure you want to post that" anytime you try to post a comment mentioning Kbin or Lemmy. I doubt he would actually give that much choice to users,

When the only viable option is a network they have zero input on, I doubt it even makes sense tbh

Is there a way to add a John Oliver angle?

Why can't you finish your projects without Reddit? Not being able to ask for help with your projects might be suck, but it can also be a rewarding experience. For the next few weeks, just try imagine yourself as a COBOL programmer from the past trying to finish a project with nothing but offline manual and no internet connections, or kidnapped Swift developer forced to finish an app in Gulag without access to social media. Who know, maybe you'll emerge as a different man at the end of the experience.