this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Okay it's fun, Reddit won't be able to remove them since a vote was held, but what impact will featuring only pics of John Oliver have on Reddit's bottom line? This achieves nothing and the pics have already tens of thousands of upvotes, meaning the engagement and traffic are back.
My take is that stuff like this counts on traffic being a flash in the pan. At first, it's funny and novel, but as time wears on the hope may be that people top engaging with funny sexy Oliver photo #93848. Hypothetically this would cause a drop in traffic and engagement, but still leave the mod team strictly in compliance with reddit's demands.
Advertisers don't just look at traffic numbers when they do buys ... anyone with any brains will be looking at content and THIS kind of thing will send them running.
Mods are in revolt. Users have fled the platform. And advertisers don't like to be associated with nastiness.
u/spez is in bigger and bigger trouble each and every minute this continues. Hence the Brown Shirt tactics...
Until spez changes the rules and allows his supporters to vote those mods out, which he already announced he'd do. That's why the recent actions by the mod teams were just pointless, almost none of them threatened Reddit's bottom line.
They could have asked users to block ads using uBlock Origin, most of them didn't. They could have stickied threads on their respective subs about Lemmy and/or the Fediverse, they didn't. They could have stickied threads where they call on users to cancel their premium subscriptions, they didn't.
Somehow they felt that what would impact Reddit's revenue the most is a silent blackout followed by some funny mischief after reopening.
They chose an action that is not harsh enough for them to be "fired" as mods, yet is strong enough to be visible.
It reminds me (to a certain extent) of absurd protests against communist authorities, which happened in my country back in Cold War times, ie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Alternative . The aim is to make the authorities look like idiots, using force to make them stop. You have to be creative, when you're fighting with someone who has total control over the platform, for me their move makes sense.