News

Yeah, it's been a slow boiling pot of water, but the problem has been the same basically the entire time.

1. Community: reddit, we do not like this thing you are doing. Insert thing here. All of ViolentAkrez's messed up porn subreddit stuff, r/jailbait, r/thedonald, firing the woman in charge of AMAs, Ellen Pao's drastic attempts at monetization (which was just her being the scapegoat for Huffman and crew) and now these API changes. Stop doing this thing that is hurting your community.
2. reddit: Here are a lot of words to say that we don't care about what any of you think, and we believe we are making the right decisions. While we understand you are all upset, we do not care and do not plan on changing.
3. Community: OK, well we're going to continue protesting this and escalating until you change it.
4. reddit: that's all great but we still don't care.
5. repeat x5 escalations
6. The matter finally hits mainstream media. Gawker, or a major online news site, if we get really lucky, there's a CNN segment on it.
7. Within 30 seconds of mainstream media coverage, reddit caves and does the thing the community asked for the entire time.

This is why the protests for this escalated so quickly. We've done those steps over and over again, for over a decade. The point of protests at this point is never to get the reddit admin's attention or change their minds. The point is to cause a big enough stink to get major media attention. The protests ramped up so quickly because there were only 30 days to change reddit's mind, they showed no indication they wanted to change, and we needed the media attention. We got plenty of media attention this time. Unfortunately, media attention isn't going to be enough to change their minds now, because this is all for an IPO and the execs want their bag of money. Even if reddit folds entirely, they'll get to walk with the bag.

But in reality, we should've ditched years ago. Because, does any of that cycle sound healthy? It's not that reddit's admins don't care. It's that they haven't cared in a long time. Huffman doesn't care. I don't think Alex Ohanian did by the end either. Aaron Schwartz cared, but too much. But if a community can only get a site's staff to stop actively harming them by putting a gun to their head every time there's a problem, there's no future for that relationship. This was just the exclamation point. Even if reddit staff totally caves, we should not go back.