The last major holdouts in the protest against Reddit’s API pricing relented, abandoning the so-called “John Oliver rules” which only allowed posts featuring the TV host. It's the official end of the battle. The Reddit protest is over, and Reddit won.
Reddit won the war because your stereotypical Reddit mod is a spineless narcissist who wields their banhammer as a coping mechanism for their real life issues. It’s like being an internet caretaker was the only way they could gain any kind of validation.
They could very easily have overwhelmed the site and brought Reddit’s admins to their knees had they collectively disabled automoderator, unbanned every user and just refused to enforce any rules (incl sitewide ones.) But the moment Reddit started threatening to demod people, they caved incredibly quickly, or tried to pull off alternative forms of protest to piss off the admins, but not to the point where they’d be immediately demodded and purged, á la AwkwardTheTurtle.
Anyone could have seen this coming from a mile away the moment we started seeing r/pics and r/videos push dumb rule changes like expletives in titles, text only, sexy pics of John Oliver, etc…
Honestly the only good thing that came out of the API protests were iBleeedOrange and AwkwardTheTurtle being permabanned from Reddit, and it’s bittersweet that the hill Reddit chose to kill them on was over third-party apps.
Wait, wut? iBleeedOrange got it too?
I would not mind reading more if you have some links to share.
EDITED TO ADD: This is all I could find myself; I guess the admins couldn’t abide anyone not in lockstep:
https://teddit.hostux.net/r/interestingasfuck/comments/149d4gz/reddit_is_killing_third_party_apps_and_itself/
https://old.reddit.com/user/ibleeedorange
Not sure why either. My guess is that it had something to do with when he changed the rules of r/interestingasfuck and effectively turned it into a porn sub to spite the site’s advertisers. But I only recall him and everybody else being forcibly demodded. Maybe he threw some incredibly colorful language at the admins and got banhammered.
As much as I loathe iBleeedBullshit and think he’s a power-tripping asshole who doesn’t even understand the rules of the subreddits he used to moderate (had a few online altercations with him in the past), Spez is acting even more childish, to the point where the power mod purge feels nowhere near as cathartic as it should have…
Cool, thanks for the info. I missed all that somehow.
Ohhhh, yeah. No argument there.
But it’s not as straightforward a situation as it seems. Reddit is now partially owned by others, meaning that Spez does answer to a board. So, contrary to popular belief, being a total gaping asshole is actually NOT Spez’s sole skill. Turns out he’s also some other people’s very useful idiot.
To put it another way, an entire team of 1%ers who stand to profit off Reddit’s future IPO thinks that all this is a good thing and a means to a desired end, or he’d already have been tossed out. At this point I’m just waiting to see them tip their hand as to what they think that will be, because I have no clue myself, lol.
EDITED TO ADD this link, it’s an old but informative one in regard to the role of Reddit’s board: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3dcmr1/the_role_of_reddits_board_of_directors/