Yeah it’s now “oh and maybe we’ll do ‘touch grass tuesdays’ in perpetuity”. That’s an incredibly unsympathetic message imo.
Get real. If anyone thinks a business is going to tolerate a clique of powermods choosing to randomly shut things down according to their own schedule… they’re gonna be disappointed.
Let alone I’ve seen some people thinking they can demand a hand in the corporate governance? Yeah fuck no powermods are not ever getting a seat on the board, lol, lmao. No company in the world would ever agree to that. Especially not after all of this.
Yeah, they’re gonna pry the mods off and reopen things, sooner or later. Unless something changes mods are going to leave things permanently closed after the 30th and walk away, and Reddit is absolutely not going to tolerate that. But there’s no reason to wait that long really.
The 5 mods running an average of 18 top-100 subs each are not going to be as tough to replace as people think they are, the reality is at that scale you’re not managing anything operationally on a day to day level, you’re setting up a script.
It’s the lower-level jannies that will be the trouble, because they’re the ones doing the actual work, not the person claiming to mod 200 million subscribers worth of content. And at the end of the day you can find some people willing to click “delete” on spam while they’re scrolling. That’s plausible if they can get over the bump gracefully. And truth is there’s always people willing to do it for the prestige, even as pitiful as that is.
The Reddit play here is obviously to pry the powermods off, get the frontpage subs back open, and get moderation back to some kind of a semi functional level (automated or otherwise) until it blows over and organic moderation can resume. And that’s a reasonably achievable goal.
But the powermod squad needs to consider what their own exit strategy is too… nobody is going to let powermods randomly shut things down on an ongoing basis. If they’re disruptive then they put Reddit in a position of being forced to remove them, it is what it is, Reddit can’t operate with a cabal of a half dozen users able to shut down the front page at will either. If Reddit doesn’t have a fundamental belief in the powermods being good-faith players they are gone regardless of the consequences, because the alternative is unacceptable. They will deal with the consequences and move forward, most likely successfully.
People act like Spez is somehow out of line and they can just get him tossed out, like the board is going to sign off on letting a bunch of agitators disrupt operations on an ongoing and indefinite basis.