I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, democracy simply doesn’t work
it’s kind of sad to see hogs on this site regard this whole situation with such disdain. this is a prototype for mass internet action. this is extremely important. at worst, we can learn from their mistakes. the nihilism of internet politics was a mistake.
We already learned from their mistakes when they did this with Net Neutrality and it went nowhere. They didn’t learn from their mistakes.
and what mistakes did we learn from? did we consider why it failed, or what they could have done differently? or did we just dismiss the entire concept because it was internet politics?
even if you think we can’t learn from mistakes here, we can definitely agitate
You cannot organize an effective protest around boycotting the consumption of a ‘free’ product, because it already didn’t make any financial sense anyways. The only thing that could make this work was the organization and withdrawal of mod labor, which was the effective part of the protest. It remains to be seen if it will be effective, but since scabbing is already prevalent, and the entire project of reddit is and has been mostly funded by Department of Defense and/or pedophile dollars anyways, attempting to ‘salvage’ reddit was always a fool’s game. You can’t compete with the inherent structural forces that drive reddit, only make another, separate, structure. Even if the mods were to win, do we really want a ‘stable reddit with less contradictions’?
Don’t get me wrong. Fucking with reddit and redditors is hilarious and good, but pretending it is political praxis is kidding yourself.
The left will never become a significant force on reddit, the last chance was r/chapotraphouse and the last hoorah was r/antiwork and look what happened to them
It needs to die, the subs need to be scattered across the internet and seed new developments
So if /r/chapotraphouse precipitated the great scattering with its death, does that make it the Kwisatz Haderach?
each community should be working on a lifeboat for themselves. it’s one thing to threaten to go dark indefinitely, it’s something else to articulate a process for off-platform organizing/planning and just goofing off away from reddit admins. if the guy who owns the party house wants to charge admission, go find another party house.
i was looking at some sub, i can’t remember but it was something skill related and the fear of users mass deleting their own posts was setting in with the wake of subs going private. subs going private is potent but ultimately symbolic. the admins can seize control and turn it back on. the actual threat is for users to overwrite -> delete their posts/comments and leave. it would be catastrophic for the social value of reddit as a hub of content.
and the 3rd party api stuff that makes it possible to mass delete is going away at the end of the month. so there’s a clock on this tactic.
