Thanks for telling - and I wish lots of boring days for new admins. :)

'cause interesting days would mean folks can’t behave

I’m convinced 99% people posting that same blog post that sells opinions as facts, haven’t actually lived through it.

I’m a person who lost contact with people on Facebook while using Pidgin. This unfortunate development in ancient history actually forced me to briefly register on Facebook to maintain contact - because they couldn’t be convinced to adopt Pidgin and Pidgin users were a minority (as were users of other XMPP messenger apps, at least separately counted).

Prognosis: Facebook will play along to gain mass, then go incompatible. They will do this at a moment when they think users will gravitate towards their side of the fence.

Advise: never open that door, there be dragons on the other side.

We should remember what they have already done, and expect more of the same, because they haven’t changed. Justified grudges are perfectly fine to hold. A corporation that has harmed society by supporting polarization in many countries (formation of echo chambers, targeted advertising) should be boycotted in retribution.

Remembering what Facebook did with XMPP (initially allowed their users to speak to other messengers’ users, then got sloppy with compatibility, causing great workload to unrelated app developers, and finally, having accumulated enough mass for Messenger, stopped supporting XMPP) - Facebook should be avoided like fire.

Facebook is also bad for society, allowing manipulation (targeted advertizing), aggregating great amounts of user data (harming privacy) and prioritizing user engagement regardless of the social cost (a hateful conflict generates more clicks than cat photos).

Mods can leave a community private. Reddit can replace mods. But replacing mods is not a trivial process - you either have to pay them, or they have to be interested in doing that.

At long last, if agreement cannot be reached and Reddit decides to show their kingly status (referring to their naming mods as landed gentry :P ), Reddit might establish a standard way of mods being elected.

Alas, most subreddits aren’t invested enough in the process of delegating power to hold regular mod elections, and even those that do (r/anarchism comes to mind), require proof (of work / effort / participation) to qualify. Reddit would have to provide a mechanism.

Since they obviously won’t, apparently they just threaten protesting subreddits with administrative takeover. A great way to ram the platform into ground. :o