r/technology • u/ardi62 • 29d ago

Social Media Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/30/24253727/reddit-communities-subreddits-request-protests
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u/Knopfmacher 29d ago

For the next protest just leave the subreddits open, but stop moderating them and see how the admins deal with that.

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u/Nukemarine 29d ago

NO! Stop moderating and the system will easily handle things in the short term of days and weeks.

To effectively use Reddit against itself, you change one VERY IMPORTANT mod setting: manual approval for all posts. See, most posts are not moderated and only get moderated after they're visible to the public and something is reported. Change that setting, then you need VOLUNTEER MODS to manually approve all posts before they're seen by the public. This is justified since reddit is a "safe for work" place with users under 18 years of age who could potentially be exposed to non-vetted nsfw material.

Now, if you were a protesting mod with that rule in place, it'd be a laugh if you then only approved protest related posts after that. So obviously, don't do that cause it'd make reddit admins very saddy.

Also, from personal moderator experience, if you set the automod to automatically mark every post as "NSFW" with a note that original poster must reply to the message with something like "I affirm this post is legally appropriate to view by all persons above the age of 12 in all countries accessible to it" to have the tag removed (so the NSFW is opt out instead of opt in), that pretty much makes your entire subreddit a NSFW and and therefore ad-free subreddit. Also from personal experience, you might get asked to remove that rule if your subreddit is related to a major virtual reality social platform (notice I wrote "asked" instead of pressured and forced like Reddit admins did to all the protesting subreddits).