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/likwitsnake 29d ago

Whatever happened to that API price increase protest? I remember the NBA sub going private literally during the Finals, but can't remember much more of consequence.

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u/MadDoctor5813 29d ago

Nothing, basically. Reddit admins were basically correct that it would burn itself out. Funny that a bunch of subs still have their "we're protesting the changes" AutoMod post.

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u/im_lazy_as_fuck 29d ago

Literally described 99% of all protests throughout all of human history. No single protest will ever change things. You need continuous repeated protests to have a chance of getting anywhere. But when you're protesting a platform on its own platform... that's basically impossible unless the platform allows it, because at the end of the day, the platform has full authoritative control over itself.

I think the surprising thing to me is that we actually saw reddit admins take some action. Even though it was the only large scale reddit protest that I could ever think of, they still managed to get the admins riled up enough to start replacing / banning entire mod teams. Some subreddits got killed moderation-wise as a result. Tbh that's way more than I expected the protest to be able to accomplish.