But I know that /r/programming has two Reddit administrators as part of the mods, so I'm not surprised they're not going dark.
Is there anything stopping Reddit from making the CEO a mod in every major sub though?
Moderation takes time and unless Reddit is going to pony up $$$ to pay mods to sweep in on short notice, then I suspect people who casually volunteer will quickly be overwhelmed.
You basically need people willing to donate lots of their time to read new on a specific subreddit constantly (there is a reason (in a consequentialist sense) mods tend to enforce their opinion on every post, it's cause they spend hours reading every single one already, and the kind of person willing to do that probably has some (obsessive) opinions).
There are some subreddits where you can be a mod and you get pinged and you make decision, and so you can spend your time doing other things and still help, but they are very small. And there are some tools that let you take the "and I get pinged and I make a decision" up to the larger subreddit scale, and tools which make reading new easier to do... these are the tools reddit is going to get rid of / make pay only.
So yea, it's going to be even harder to find some poor schmuck with no life willing to donate a bunch of their free time to create high quality subreddits that comply with the admin's rules (which is actually what a lot of "do whatever you want" mods end up spending most of their time dealing with). And the people they do find are going to have even stronger personal influences on subreddits than the current ones do.
The biggest sub I mod recently grew to ~10k users, it's German speaking, and covers a pretty niche topic. That sub alone is already a surprising amount of work, and 10k is absolutely tiny.
Automod alone removes 4-5 posts a day, and there's still quite a lot of bot generated, irrelevant, or spammy posts and comments that manage to bypass the filters. I can't imagine the amount of spam that would flow in at a subreddit hundreds of times larger than that.
Let's see what will happen in few days.
I really, really don't hope much of reddit moves to discord, it would be a disaster for the usability of search engines.
Personally, I think it just goes to show that if you make a platform which depends on people's generosity to keep content well moderated, you should absolutely consider those generous people as your company's main resources.... and if you piss them off, as your worst enemies.
I don't think the blackout will be limited by its scope so much as by its duration
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/1401qw5/incomplet... [1]https://www.reddit.com/best/communities/1/
My old.reddit.com homepage hasn't change much. Missing is r/ProgrammerHumor but r/Programming is there, alongside with r/darksky, r/wallstreetbets etc.
All the porn seems to be there too, which might actually move some numbers if gone dark.
The only sub which I care and it's gone is r/StableDiffusion
Which leads me to believe that the boycott will remove only a subset of reddit users and we are about to see how much reddit cares about that subset.
Redesigns on the other hand can kill a site. That's the only thing I've seen many times killing a website.