The subreddit r/steam, about the digital game storefront, received as many other subreddits a notice to open the community again, or else the mods would be replaced by those who abide.
The mods followed suit posting the following automod message under every new post:
As ya'll likely know, we've been dark to support the blackout against reddit's antagonistic behavior towards its own userbase. The admins sent us a message today saying we must open or get removed, so here we are.
For those of you browsing this subreddit on non-official apps (Reddit is Fun, Apollo, Sync, Boost, etc), they will break on July 1st due to reddit's new policies. We're opening back up but will leave permanent stickies in the subreddit and threads to keep folks in the know.
Our Discord [contains link to https://discord.gg/steam] server is active, don't forget to check it out.
Good luck and god speed.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
On visit, you quickly notice there is a community wide effort to focus on the literal topic of the given name and post about vapors, steam trains, and kitchen appliances. While posts about the gaming platform get downvoted.
There is the nuance to it. The subscribers did not sign up for this initially. Therefore they will have to build a new community up which certainly won't have as many subscribers for a very long time and none of the post history.
At the same time posts actually asking about the Steam platform get downvoted heavily and thus dissuade further interaction.
Effectively the sub becomes useless, just the same as if it had stayed closed. It will drop in engagement in the long term.
The John Oliver memes attract more mainstream attention and clearly signal to investors the platform is not healthy, irrespective of the traffic it causes.
With more and more subreddits joining in on this, the All page gets flooded with shitposts annoying everyone. Those who stay certainly won't want to deal with this all the time and unsubscribe.
Of course group dynamics are unpredictable at times, but reddit is certainly more in turmoil than whatever traffic.
Not to mention that the argument that moderators are acting in bad faith against what the users want isn't really holding up if a rather decent chunk of active users are in favor of doing this.
r/pics held a poll and their users CHOSE the john oliver memes. other subs are doing something similar, giving 'go back to normal' as an option because otherwise the admins might just remove them anyway for not giving users a real choice.
THIS!
i truly thought going to a different site would at least mean no more 'this!' comments :(
Thanks, I was missing that point of view but I see what you mean.
I guess the way I see it is that, right now, people are enthusiastically joining in, which is still driving a sense of community. I guess I'm not as convinced that, long term, people will be driven to make new communities. I feel like the more likely scenario is that people will grow bored and go back to their normal, everyday posting.
Edit: I do agree the invester point is definitely one I didn't consider and is definitely a huge factor to all of this. Of course, it goes without saying that it at least signals the turmoil at Reddit and brings more attention to it. Not all press is good press in this case.
Whatever happens, I fully intend to sit back and enjoy watching the drama unfold.
I think it's more likely people will get bored and just stop going to reddit. Right now the ones taking part in the protest are the creators and hard core users, while the casual users either aren't taking part or are just not using reddit right now.
Longer term this will destroy reddit on google searches ruining one of the major drivers of traffic.
In the short term it's a question of if the casual users get tired first and stop going to reddit, or the hard core users get bored of trolling spez. If the former happens first then reddits non-troll traffic dies off and when the hard core users get bored and leave and then there will be almost nobody left.
Ultimately in order for the protesters to win they don't need to permanently destroy reddit, just to effectively shut it down for the next 6 months or so as literally this entire thing, both the changes reddit instituted and the backlash, is about the IPO. Spez was looking to pump the value quickly so he could cash out and so he went with some incredibly aggressive and anti-user policies that he hoped would generate a massive revenue spike and look good to investors. Instead the users are giving spez a boot to the teeth and reminding him that he has nothing without them.