The landed gentry are only in charge until the king comes to town and chops off a few heads. At least that seems to be the case at Reddit, where CEO Steve Huffman pretended his complaints about current moderators — who were protesting his decision to effectively cut off API access to tons of useful…
Not just “not concerned”, it was literally their formal position that mods owned the subs that they modded. You couldn’t remove a mod for anything except breaking TOS or for being inactive. If the mod was active and not actively breaking TOS then reddits response has ALWAYS been “if you don’t like the way the sub is being handled, make your own sub and let the free market sort out whether yours or theirs is better”.
They held that position since the founding of reddit and it was as fundamental to the platform as the ability to create your own instance with your own rules is here on Lemmy. Right up until it was starting to get in the way of the CEOs big IPO payday.
And that is exactly why I am here now. I didn’t care that much for the API protests at all. Thought they were pointless. But this behavior meant that they were violating the very thing the made reddit, reddit. If subs weren’t spaces that anyone could use to try to carve out their own communities, then what is the point?
Furthermore, they aren’t even violating the code of conduct they are using to do this, so clearly all of Reddit’s promises are now worthless.
Reddits definition of inactive has seemingly changed to benefit them as well.
A sub I was in fought for 2 years to get rid of our derelict landlord and every time, reddit would alert him and he’d show up nuke any dissent and then vanish again after having been missing and unresponsive for months. The ONLY moderation the guy did was to remove anyone that tried to direct people to a sub that had actual moderators and only after one of us made a request to take the sub that he abandoned, and reddit did not care.
Now suddenly having your sub private is enough and mods who were active the day before spez got angry about it are removed because they’d been away for a couple weeks prior. Horse crap.