I’d love to see Reddit continue to descend into chaos.
Mmm malicious compliance, you love to see it.
Never get into a malicious comply-off with a Redditor.
Man, when this writer’s strike ends i cant wait to see John Oliver talk about this.
the look on his face when the thirst of the comments and post titles sets in.
Man that most evoke all of the emotions. Weirded out, happy, flattered, confused, dumbfounded, …
I’d be shocked if he didn’t already know.
He posted about it and gave a few pics too on a Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/iamjohnoliver/status/1670179738348933120
TIL about that website for privacy, thanks!
Well played r/pic and r/gifs mods, well played. This is hilarious.
funniest shit i’ve read today. perfect malicious compliance
Brilliant.
Okay it’s fun, Reddit won’t be able to remove them since a vote was held, but what impact will featuring only pics of John Oliver have on Reddit’s bottom line? This achieves nothing and the pics have already tens of thousands of upvotes, meaning the engagement and traffic are back.
My take is that stuff like this counts on traffic being a flash in the pan. At first, it’s funny and novel, but as time wears on the hope may be that people top engaging with funny sexy Oliver photo #93848. Hypothetically this would cause a drop in traffic and engagement, but still leave the mod team strictly in compliance with reddit’s demands.
but still leave the mod team strictly in compliance with reddit’s demands.
Until spez changes the rules and allows his supporters to vote those mods out, which he already announced he’d do. That’s why the recent actions by the mod teams were just pointless, almost none of them threatened Reddit’s bottom line.
They could have asked users to block ads using uBlock Origin, most of them didn’t. They could have stickied threads on their respective subs about Lemmy and/or the Fediverse, they didn’t. They could have stickied threads where they call on users to cancel their premium subscriptions, they didn’t.
Somehow they felt that what would impact Reddit’s revenue the most is a silent blackout followed by some funny mischief after reopening.
They chose an action that is not harsh enough for them to be “fired” as mods, yet is strong enough to be visible.
It reminds me (to a certain extent) of absurd protests against communist authorities, which happened in my country back in Cold War times, ie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Alternative . The aim is to make the authorities look like idiots, using force to make them stop. You have to be creative, when you’re fighting with someone who has total control over the platform, for me their move makes sense.
The admins have shown that they are not going to flinch so easily. If mods shut down subreddits then the admins are simply going to reassign the subreddits to more compliant mods and reopen them, and Reddit will resume operation. To casual Redditors, it will appear that the site is ‘back to normal’ and the interruption to their endless-scrolling-dopamine-hit is over.
The r/pics and r/gifs mods see that this is going to be a long game, so they’ve gone for malicious compliance. The message of dissent will continue WITHIN Reddit’s walls, and the awareness campaign will continue.
The final battle will begin at the end of this month when the API is restricted and 3rd-party apps stop working. The awareness campaign will drastically redirect the casual Redditors ’ anger/outrage that their favorite app no longer works from the apps’ creator (“my stupid Apollo app stopped working”) directly to spez.
It appears that spez thinks that Redditors will smoothly switch to the official reddit app… but I think that he drastically underestimates how resistant people are to change of any kind. It will be interesting to watch things unravel. Hopefully, this will be epic, but I suspect that it’ll be more game-of-thrones.
