Dan Carlin's Hardcore History 71 - Mania for Subjugation

Dear Steve Huffman, /u/spez

And the Board of Directors of Advance Publications and of Reddit, Inc.

I am known for being verbose. So, in this instance, let me be as brief as possible:

Spez had some conversations with Elon Musk — the owner and CEO of one of Reddit's direct competitors —

And he came away from those conversations with ideas on how to “run Reddit” which, when put into motion,

have led to Reddit Admin Policies that kneecapped moderators three times in a row (PushShift, then mod bots, then the third party apps mods use in place of the official app),

Which resulted in the site exploding in protests and riots, decade-old user accounts deleting in protest, entire communities migrating to anyplace else (that's not Twitter), the people who volunteered their time and energy and expertise to keep community on this site walking away, the burning of literally decades of stakeholder expertise and skills, and damage to the goodwill and profitability of Reddit,

And the bigoted, violent harassers whom we finally got to decamp off to Twitter and back to 4chan in 2022 returning in force to Reddit to resume slandering and harassing moderators and communities, and celebrating the idea of bringing online their hate brigades to vote out any moderators foolish enough to stick around after Spez sneered at them —?

Your takeaway from conversations with the transphobic white supremacist who runs your business competition was to implement his ideas of running off all the good faith users and making your site inhospitable to advertisers —?

Dear Boards of Directors:

Start your candidate search. You have grounds. Act on them.

Signed,

/u/Bardfinn

Snapshots:

• ghostarchive.org

• archive.org

• archive.ph (click to archive)