I see a lot of posts about how they uploaded anti-spez stuff onto reddit, or participated in the nsfw spams/john oliver spams. While I get wanting to let it all out, this ultimately keeps up engagement on reddit rather than bringing it down.
The best way to make sure things go your way? Vote with your wallet, or in this case your voice. Don’t speak on reddit. Devote more time helping out the alternatives grow and flourish. And as much as it is a meme, touching some grass can help your mental fortitude.
If you absolutely 100% need to interact with reddit, I suggest installing a redirector addon (such as privacy redirect or… redirector) that can link to a teddit or libreddit instance. Or archiving it with wayback/archive.is/ghostarchive.
I agree with your premise, but not all of the details. I believe that if you don’t want to be on Reddit as it is, simply don’t be on Reddit. Depart gracefully, don’t burn bridges, don’t troll or spam. It doesn’t help anyone - your mental health included.
In many ways, I do believe that taking the high road is best when there’s an issue like this. I don’t mind being on Reddit, or kbin, or Lemmy, or Mastodon. The only social I’m never on is Twitter. I don’t see a need to be there; so I’m not. For my own part, I didn’t mind the 2-day blackout - I mind the spam, the NSFW from unexpected sources, etc. If the answer is that I need to stand up and start taking part in moderating communities to ensure that the content I want to see is what’s there, I’ll decide then whether I want to do so or not. I’m annoyed by the possibility of the app I prefer (RedReader) standing on shaky ground from now on with an “accessibility” label hung on it. I’m not a fan of ads, at the best of times, I block most advertising domains, and usually turn off ECMAScript on sites (or at least I’m picky about what is allowed to run). I’d prefer to turn it off altogether, but that’s not an option at the moment with the way the web is going.
As I’ve said before, I do not believe there’s a single active mod of a large community who doesn’t know whether or not they want to lead a community on Reddit right now. If they want to lead a community, but not on Reddit, there’s the various fediverse options, JCInk, Freeforums, NeoCities, or whatever - those people could even file an RFD and have it put up on Usenet. If they want to lead a community on Reddit, that means abiding by the rules, policies, and behaviors which have been set down. I have no problem with, say, r/piracy moving to their own Lemmy, and I’m honestly in favor of the wide adoption of alternate social media (though I worry what onerous monetization will be forced upon us when the costs get too high and each server can only afford customers, not paying users - we know ads won’t work, because of so many of us using adblockers).
If you want to be part of a community specifically on Reddit now, then be a part of that community on Reddit. If you want to be part of a community, but you’re ambivalent about Reddit, rejoin or rebuild it elsewhere. Don’t make things worse for the people who make a different decision. That just makes them become reactionary and defensive, and likely they’ll end up opposing you, and whatever it is you stand for (which in this cause could actively hurt fediverse participation).
“take your protests and picket signs to that dark corner over there where you wont bother the normies”
Thanks for this, I feel like there’s a lot of black-and-white thinking going on here. It seems like the only options presented are “burn it down!” or “you’re a scab”.