This reminds me of one comment made by a powermod, which claimed that due to Reddit mods being snakes who play politics and backstab each other at every opportunity, every attempt to gather them in one place has been utterly futile. I guess this is a unique case since every mod now has a common interest.
Another option reddit could have is to just forcibly reopen the subreddits. The mods would be upset, but what would they do? If Reddit removes the ability to private the community the most they can do is sabotage their own subreddit by allowing ToS breaking stuff to get through, and I feel like they enjoy the power too much to do that.
Even if they remove the option to go private, there are hundreds of ways to utterly sabotage a subreddit. You can prevent new posts from being posted, it's trivially easy. If they take that away, you can restrict submissions so they must be 'approved' manually by mods before they appear. You can restrict only approved users as allowed to make new posts. You can set incredibly harsh standards for source quality, or submission length. You can have exacting standards for what is allowed that almost all submissions will fail in the name of quality. You can change the purpose of the sub to be about something else. You can change the design to be offputting, you can put in bots that spam nonsense. The amount of flexible control mods have over their subreddits is massive.
There's no way to force subreddits open in a practical sense without just removing the mod teams.
Reddit's users are likely socially and demographically closer to Reddit's employees than any other social media site. I wonder how that affects things.
Your average Reddit employee probably has friends that are mad at them over this change.
Akshully, we call it "this hellsite."
This reminds me of one comment made by a powermod, which claimed that due to Reddit mods being snakes who play politics and backstab each other at every opportunity, every attempt to gather them in one place has been utterly futile. I guess this is a unique case since every mod now has a common interest.
Another option reddit could have is to just forcibly reopen the subreddits. The mods would be upset, but what would they do? If Reddit removes the ability to private the community the most they can do is sabotage their own subreddit by allowing ToS breaking stuff to get through, and I feel like they enjoy the power too much to do that.
Even if they remove the option to go private, there are hundreds of ways to utterly sabotage a subreddit. You can prevent new posts from being posted, it's trivially easy. If they take that away, you can restrict submissions so they must be 'approved' manually by mods before they appear. You can restrict only approved users as allowed to make new posts. You can set incredibly harsh standards for source quality, or submission length. You can have exacting standards for what is allowed that almost all submissions will fail in the name of quality. You can change the purpose of the sub to be about something else. You can change the design to be offputting, you can put in bots that spam nonsense. The amount of flexible control mods have over their subreddits is massive.
There's no way to force subreddits open in a practical sense without just removing the mod teams.
Arabic proverb: "Me against my brother. Me and my brother against my cousin. Me and my cousin against a stranger."
Reddit's users are likely socially and demographically closer to Reddit's employees than any other social media site. I wonder how that affects things.
Your average Reddit employee probably has friends that are mad at them over this change.