Written by DrNeurohax
"Some Thoughts on Ways Mods Can Stay in Malicious Compliance, in Order To Prolong the Protest and Their Removal by Admins.
r/funny should be proud. They sat in the crosshairs for longer than anyone thought they would. I hope they, and all the other subs pressured into going restricted or public, continue to show their support in some unique way. Some ideas:
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Include kbin/lemmy equivalent magazines in the banner and a sticky post. Sticky an autocomment on every post with fediverse info.
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Only use the standard mod tools and halve your time commitment. “We went back to using the tools they gave us and this is how it will be from now on. Welcome to the new Reddit you guys chose by not supporting the blackout!”
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Mark the sub NSFW. Realistically, there’s rarely a reason anyone in an office should be on Reddit. This should also make the sub unavailable for mobile users when the API changes go into effect.
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Make every day April Fool’s Day. Like when r/DataIsBeautiful posted nothing but pics of Star Trek’s Data. If you have no ideas, just google the sub name and see what you find!
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- PIC is also:
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- a type of long catheter that is inserted through a peripheral vein, often in the arm, into a larger vein in the body, used when intravenous treatment is required over a long period. Seems like an important topic for r/Pics to cover. (Dictionary.com)
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- Slang abbreviation for Partner In Crime, so maybe change focus to famous crime duos (Urban Dictionary)
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- Slang for a movie, so become the movie subreddit (Encyclopedia Britannica)
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- Just go nuts with https://www.abbreviations.com/pic
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Set unreasonable posting requirements without an announcement, but noting the change in the side bar. Gotta read the fine print."
Set posts to require moderator approval.
- Approve 1 post every hour or only approve really poor quality ones.
Fracture the community.
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Announce alternative subs for your topic, which you also control, and encourage unsubbing from the original sub. Do some of the above, while also setting the sub to require accounts be subscribed for a month to post. Those that leave will find nothing in the alt subs, which they can’t post to, and be unable to post on the main sub for a month. Also, fracturing the large subs will reduce traffic overall, due to the chaos.
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Remove and replace scrub mods where possible. If you get booted down the line, another supporter can continue the pattern.
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Forward any post remotely related to a product advertised on Reddit to that company’s media contact for approval. Advertisers should know what is being associated with their brands. (And if some really gnarly stuff gets submitted by some non-mod account, it might be more impactful."
We must fight back. Spread the word.
I’ll be frank, most of these ideas are childish and will result in mod removal quicker than you can say “malicious compliance”. Just keep the blackout, or maybe make posts require mod approval and set the automod reply message.
Or just silently purge all of the subreddit’s content behind the cloak of the blackout before stepping down permanently or even outright deleting the subreddit.
Can’t be done, admins have it all backed up.
If a user deletes their own content though, legal barriers arise to restoring that from backup (against the user’s explicit will)
Unfortunately, the question of legality hasn’t stopped Reddit. Many people have been reporting that their comments have been restored against their will [https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/34112/Updated-Reddit-is-quietly-restoring-deleted-AND-overwritten-posts-and#comments].
This thread prompted me to check my old account which I had completely scraped clean around a year ago. I was shocked to find that posts I made in an extremely popular subreddit a long time ago were restored. I am very sad that the admins of Reddit are resorting to such immoral tactics.
Ahh, I was hoping that like OP said in the update, it was just some bad scripts - Power Delete Suite, looking at you - that didn’t properly delete things but reported that they were. Or like a restore from backup made necessary by the outage on Monday or something.
Won’t accomplish anything - mods can’t delete the content itself, just remove the listing from public display. All that has to happen is run a script reversing post removals by [moderator XYZ] between [time period] and the sub is restored; IIRC they’ve used similar tools, or methods, in the past when a mod has gone rogue and tried to kill a community with the same methodology.
If that was possible, it is literally destroying information, much of it useful (more of it useless I know but what IS useful is hard to find on n other places. Why not export the data? Make an archive? Distribute useful content and curate it elsewhere.
True that. But there are likely quieter versions of this which mods could enact, if they wanted to slowly undermine a sub. Not necessarily advocating for this approach, though malicious compliance can have its place — and certainly not the pieces of getting people to join the fediverse by spamming Reddit. Maybe it heightens awareness of the fediverse; but not sure it sets the right tone nor ultimately serves this whole venture.
Just being a shitty mod would do a lot on a wide scale. Use only the official tools. Have a timer on your phone for how much time you will put into moderation per day. Lax up on rules. Disable all 3rd party mod tools.
It’s what’s going to happen either way, once the end of the month rolls around.
Unions have a phrase for that. It’s called “work to rule”.
You can’t just keep private anymore. Reddit admins and the reddit ceo have both said they’re no longer interested in maintaining a community run website. They can and will begin taking over subs and making them admin run. They’re going to have to rely heavily on bots for moderation, which will obviously result in massively deteriorated quality for a significant portion of the website.
The end result is reddit rebranding itself entirely. Maybe eventually they’ll do away entirely with community controlled subreddits, and instead maintain only the most popular ones. I don’t trust a single thing they say anymore, but their actions show they’re committed to morphing reddit into a newer corporate-centric social media. They will naturally shift to a model of scraping and selling user data to make up for what will inevitably be a massive decline in profits.
That’s what killed Digg, more than the interface change.
I agree. I wonder if they’ll still be in trouble even if they open but require mod approval to post. Based on the first option the OP listed, they just want people to spam reddit for kbin/lemmy which is pretty cringe. There are a lot of options/alternatives out there which if people want to know about they should be shown most/all of them, instead of just one.
Yup, just a friendly reminder highlighting alternatives (fedi or otherwise) would suffice. Which can be done through a pinned reply by automoderator.
Ruining user’s experience yourself just makes them hate you specifically. Kind of how titanfall players hate the DDOS attackers more than EA now.
Going NSFW would do quite a bit to kill a default sub. It means only lurkers with accounts and nsfw enabled could see the posts. It would also kill more google scraping of it.