The protest on Reddit change face, literally: tre popolari subreddit, r/pics, r/gifs e r/aww, they’ve changed their rules and are now only accepting posts dedicated to the comedian and Last Week Tonight host John Oliver. After the “threats” of Reddit, which had floated the possibility of removing moderators who did not want to reopen the communities, these three groups have reactivated the subreddits. But, after consulting users, introduced the new rules. Which are an alternative way to protest.
Protest Reddit, three subreddits only post about John Oliver
Last week, the moderators of thousands of subreddits have put their communities in private or restricted mode to protest the upcoming API changes they will make users’ favorite third-party apps are unusable. This is because, according to app developers like Apollo via Redditthe cost to developers would be millions of dollars each month – the apps would then shut down.
The moderators then made the communities private for two days, others extended the protest even more. But CEO Steve Huffman argued that not all users agreed. And that if the moderators hadn’t reopened the communities, Reddit would have deposed them to protect the presumed majority of users. However, the moderators wanted to show that the commutes agree with them.
Users voted on changing the rules
“Our subreddit recently did a poll to choose his fate,” the r/gifs moderator u/IronSentinel explained. “This idea came from the statements of the CEO of Reddit, who said that i needs of the normal users of the platform were ignored by those of the moderators”.
“It’s like a rally in a city that goes on too long, and the rest of the city’s residents want to get their lives back,” CEO Steve Huffman told The Verge on Thursday, despite reporter Jay Peters pointing out that posts about the protest were the most upvoted. Huffman called the moderators “landed gentry” in an interview with NBC.
Then the subreddit moderators r/pics (over 30 million subscribers), r/gifs (over 21 million subscribers) er/aww (over 34 million subscribers) they asked the communities what they thought. There were two options: go back to normal or post only content about John Oliver, the popular presenter of the award-winning Last Week Tonight. The results:
- r/pics: back to normal, -2,329 votes; “Only allow images of John Oliver in sexy poses”, 37,331 votes.
- r/gif: back to normal, -1,851 votes; contain only John Oliver GIFs, 13,696 votes.
- r/aww: back to normal, -2,691 votes; allow only “lovable content with John Oliver, Chiijohn [una mascotte] and anything else that closely resembles it,” 48,506 votes.
After the landed gentry, the common people also spoke. And so the protest on Reddit turned into an online fair dedicated to John Oliver.
How John Oliver took the turn in the Reddit protest
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver won 26 Emmys (including 7 for Outstanding Talk Show Writing in a row) with a particular recipe. Each week offers an in-depth look at a theme (from tobacco to prisons, from inheritance taxes to Donald Trump) mixing journalistic rigor and irreverent jokes. And it often concludes with a “stunt”: a sensational protest that regularly goes viral on social media.
So John Oliver could only be happy with the turnaround in the protest on Reddit. Commenting on Twitter “Dear Reddit, excellent work,” he posted some of the ridiculous photographs r/pics posted of him. Magician’s suit, in pajamas, with a preposterous mustache.
The strike continues
These three subreddits have therefore chosen a new way to protest. But many continue to “go on strike,” blacking out their subreddit. More than 4,000 Reddit communities that protested blacking out have come back online in the past few days, according to a site that monitors them: at the beginning of the protest there were more than 8,000 those blocked.
However, some have reopened obtorto collo. Reddit messaged certain moderators saying they could help them remove the older moderator “if the moderators higher up in the list prevented the reopening”, and a moderator of r/Apple said it reopened the community because it feared it would be forcibly reopened otherwise.
At the moment it doesn’t appear that Reddit has put this forcing into practice. That could be very problematic: Reddit’s success depends on thousands of volunteer moderators who devote their time to monitoring subreddits. While it is true that the company will soon find others, a mass takedown could undermine trust in the platform. We will keep you informed on the progress of the protest.