#special thanks to lirulin for gently breaking this to me instead of telling me to shut up like I probably deserved

[supermo0]

Okay, after a few days of time to think about it, and in light of reddit taking the ultimate step of removing mods when they started to fuck around, I’m comfortable telling Past Me to shut the fuck up.

The above narrative is something that’s going to be pushed by idiots who are generally just mad that mods told them they can’t say the n word once and are willing to take any narrative that allows them to point and laugh, even if it means the destruction of the fabric of the community they’re posting in. The ongoing efforts by mods to do something, *anything* with the limited power that they have in this situation should be applauded.

I’m doing this as a reblog to emphasize that it’s not unreasonable to feel the above - at first blush. Frustration is natural. But channeling that frustration at the true aggressors (the reddit staff) is much more productive than going for the easy target (the protesting mods).

The Reddit blackout is frustrating, because the average person closing a subreddit was probably doing it for sincere reasons, and the majority of users support it in principle.

In practice it feels like a case study in slacktivism. Some of this is Reddit themselves successfully forcing people’s hands, but it already feels like the messaging has been lost to “greedy mods holding onto power”, in part because of actual instances of it.

The two day window was a perfect amount of time to make people feel like something was being accomplished, when it really just was hot air. Pivoting to indefinite just pissed off a vocal contingent, which Reddit is now capitalizing on.

Do I have an answer to what should’ve happened differently? No, I’m not a labor organizer. But that’s kind of the point, this was a bunch of people Angry on the Internet trying to Do a Thing, when what they needed was a properly organized strike.

Id love to be wrong, and that Reddit relents to some degree. I don’t have my hopes up.