Huffman said in an interview that he plans to institute rules changes that would allow Reddit users to vote out moderators who have overseen the protest, comparing them to a “landed gentry.”
Huffman said in an interview that he plans to institute rules changes that would allow Reddit users to vote out moderators who have overseen the protest, comparing them to a “landed gentry.”
As a former founder and moderator of a community that chose to host on Reddit, this is an even bigger red flag than the APIs.
Someone deciding where to put the effort in to build a community would now be crazy to do it on Reddit. This unambiguously takes it from being the founder’s community that happens to be on Reddit, where they are investing their time to build their own community, to Reddit’s community where the founding moderator works at Reddit’s pleasure to serve Reddit for free. Reddit has already made other steps on that journey - but this would be the most overt wake up call that moderators are not free to shape their own community to a vision for how it will operate if they chose to host it on Reddit if it doesn’t please the masses.
This is short-sighted, because people are going to found communities off Reddit instead. Tooling like Lemmy is only getting better, so Reddit is increasingly an unattractive choice.
It is also unnecessary - if people don’t like the premise of a community, they can vote with their feet, and go to another one, and put in the effort to build the new community themselves. And applying the same principles to Reddit itself, if a majority of Reddit users say they don’t want Spez to be CEO any more, or don’t like the Board, should they be allowed to fire him, even if the shareholders don’t want to do that? Or should they just vote with their feet and go to Lemmy? If he is anything but a hypocrite, he should let the users decide if he will continue as CEO.