Hey — one of the mods mentioned in the article here.
The idea was that if enough subreddits banded together and shut down, we could have brought Reddit to the negotiating table and helped to save the 3rd party apps so many of us relied upon for our daily Reddit experience.
Unfortunately, it seems that way too many mods preferred the sense of control they had over their communities rather than what was right or just. All those subs that went public again after 48 hours, and all the other ones that went public again but with protest content killed all momentum the protest had, and doomed it.
The part all too many people miss is that Reddit is like an iceberg on the ocean — while frequent visitors see the new content at the top, it’s the huge mass of old content that brings Reddit the bulk of its revenue. It’s all that old content that is indexed by Google and which shows up towards the top of Google search results — and during the shutdown, all of those links were broken. Google even took note during the protest that a significant number of search results were leading to broken links.
This look was terrible for Reddit, and hit them directly in the pocketbook. But then some mods decided they didn’t mind being bent over a barrel by Reddit so long as they could put “moderator” on their resume and reopened too soon. The subs that went with John Oliver content were droll, but also reopened the huge mass of content that lies beneath the waves and which Google indexes into. Reddit didn’t lose anything from those subs.
I was fully expecting to be turfed. I pretty openly dared Reddit to do it. After the shit they pulled I wasn’t going to go back and do free work for them on their terms. I forced them to be the bad guy. We had to show people how Reddit was treating its volunteer moderators, and in the end they didn’t disappoint.