“They’re shooting themselves in the foot,” Mir says. “The content of the users is what makes the platform worth visiting. These hosts kind of run into this confusion that their hosting is the reason people are going there, but it’s really for the other users on the medium.”
When the “vocal minority” are the ones providing quality content and weeding out the crap (i.e. power users and mods), it will take its toll. That minority is critical for making the whole thing work.
Power users maybe, but the last days have shown how little spine some mods have. The moment Reddit threatens to kick them as a mod they tuck their tail and say “We we’re all in until they threatened to take out mod positions. This sub now goes back to normal because there’s no world where we get removed as mods.”
On the one hand, this does seem to be a case of spinelessness. On the other hand, having mods who are aware of the protest and also in on it is better than having them replaced. All the subs going the way of malicious compliance (ie wellthatsucks turning into a vaccum cleaner subreddit) will need mods who are in on the protest.
I didn’t mean mods of subs that opened and continued to protest through malicious compliance. I mean subs like /r/livestreamfails or /r/pcgaming that opened and returned to normal like nothing happened. The mods of those subs were willing to protest only until their mod status was threatened, and then they backed down immediately.