Like many other subreddits, r/Finland is allowing its users to vote for whether or not they should a) reopen as normal, b) remain closed, or c) remain in protest mode.
However, the admins just sent them a nastygram essentially saying that's not allowed:
Your community sees well over 2 million unique visitors each month. Allowing a small segment of those users to make a decision for a community forever does not make sense. There are a huge number of people that use this space now and who will in the future
Polling to close is not a viable option that will return a result that resolves this situation
However, mods can also see traffic stats, which show them as closer to 20k uniques per month. My guess is that this is a copy/pasted message and a whole bunch of subreddits are getting this notice.
I thought this was a particularly nasty new development, since up until now the excuse has been that we can't let these Landed Gentry dictate the state of our subreddits, but now they're explicitly saying that they also don't care about how the users of a subreddit vote either.
Wow, I should think it should be some kind of regulatory concern that Reddit is artifically inflating traffic counts as they're approaching an IPO, no? For a company whose revenue comes from advertising and user impressions, lying about user traffic is lying about profitability.
That's less a regulatory thing and more of a shareholder lawsuit after the fact thing. Which I think r would be even more hilarious, rich fucks suing arrogant moronic assholes like spez and his Admin lackeys
Reddit is also arguably invalidating their Section 230 protections by exercising too much editorial control over content.
My guess is that the admin who sent that just copied & pasted the same message they're sending to other subreddits without editing it first. They have a limited amount of admins, and there are a lot of subreddits that went (and remain) private, so they're definitely not writing bespoke messages to each and every subreddit.
I suspect they have some rough templates depending on the scenario each subreddit is operating under: