Comment on Is lemmy dying?
Skavau@piefed.social 12 hours ago2023 was such a wasted opportunity because the moderators chickened out. For about a week, almost every single sizeable community was blacked out. A large chunk of Reddit during that period was genuinely inaccessible. Reddit would have been unprepared for a complete mass-walkout of community moderators during the 2023 Reddit API strikes. But after a few token gestures and a few examples made of some especially rebellious mod-teams, most of the striking moderators returned.
A huge opportunity was missed by people running major communities to functionally degrade Reddit in at least the medium-term as a website. You can’t just hastily promote random people to replace moderators Reddit is either forced to remove or who leave voluntarily. The average person is likely too lazy, too arbitrary and too corrupt to effectively oversee communities of notable sizes.
Blaze@piefed.zip 6 hours ago
The mods who left were quickly replaced.
The ones who stayed but didn’t comply were replaced too.
Some just liked being in power too much.
Skavau@piefed.social 6 hours ago
Most mod teams didn’t leave. They made an example of a handful of especially rebellious mod teams, albeit I believe in most cases they had a quisling near the bottom of the mod list contacting reddit to tell them they would happily take over.
But there’s a difference between doing that dozen times, and having to do that a thousand times.
The subreddit mods had all the power. If the top mods of all the communities that blacked out just removed all mods and shut down the subreddit, it would’ve been chaos on Reddits end.