an internal memo leaked from ceo steve huffman saying the “noise” of the blackout will die out and they just need to weather it until we give up. fuck you spez.
first of all it’s OVER EIGHT THOUSAND subreddits that went dark.
second of all he clearly doesn’t give one single shit about the users or the UNPAID army of mods who slog through a million miles of shit every day to keep illegal and offensive content off the site (i’m a mod in a small fandom subreddit and even the shit i’ve seen is beyond the pale) and therefore make it appealing to the advertizers.
you have no fucking business without us. and you don’t care one single bit about it.
he clearly did not mean for this memo to leak, but someone at reddit thought it was important enough to send it out anyway. please spread it (spreddit?) especially because so much of reddit is still in blackout.
This feels very similar to the uproar they LITERALLY JUST HAD in the D&D community over changes that would have negatively impacted third party creators. People started canceling their subscriptions to the paid service and Wizards of the Coast really thought they could get away with it by issuing a weak apology and waiting it out.
The community got angrier, so WotC thought they could get away with it by backing down to a half measure.
The community got even ANGRIER.
WotC ended up backing down to such an extent that they not only canceled all of the planned changes but released their core material under a creative commons license to boot, putting them BEHIND their starting position.
This is what we should be aiming for. I’ve used reddit daily for like fifteen years, but sometimes the only thing you can do to save a community you love is to genuinely be willing to walk away until the corporate bigwigs in charge get it through their heads that they actually NEED users. I want to make this the year of companies fucking around and finding out that unhappy users can cause them problems. Starve the bastards out and make them realize they need us more.
This blog is about what most people don’t learn in school, what actually happened in the worlds’ histories.