Re:/r/programming is back
by brucethemoose2 on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @04:35PM
(#36606745)
The subreddit does not exist as it does without the work of the mods.
Maybe its not completely justified, but the mods have a significant voice in this argument.
I also doubt bots are driving traffic, but I still find these LLM responses to be very strange.
It's not like the mods owe their community anything. They work for free on a platform that clearly doesn't value them.
Also, if you truly agree with the protest and your main concern is communities closing down, then I don't see the problem with funneling users to the corresponding new community on lemmy/kbin/mastodon/etc.
The only reason traffic went down is because of mods locking/limiting their subreddits. They do not speak for the community at large and if they were indeed removed, traffic would be instantly back to normal. No need to employ conspiracy theories.
I may agree with the reasons for the protest, but I disagree that mods have the right to kill the whole community. /r/firefox for example now only allows images of red pandas. They killed the subreddit just to funnel users to their lemmy instance.