Don't believe this for one second. Like many others have said, it was mostly a vocal minority. /r/pics has 8+ million subscribers and you think a majority of those subscribers wanted it to be shut down?
I'm honestly surprised the mods have the power to shut down a default subreddit.
And you think it didn't? I don't see you offering up any evidence for your position other than assuming they can't have because of the sheer number.
Meanwhile we have at least some indication that there were support well beyond the moderators, in the form of heavily upvoted threads with large number of comments in support of shutdowns for many subreddits.
It's very possible that the majority didn't support the shutdowns, but that support went far beyond the moderators is a fact easily ascertained by looking at the threads.
https://i.imgur.com/nrYiK5M.png
From https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/3cjsm7/ell...
To be honest, it's hard to argue either way. Going by your indication, if we look at /r/all the past week and all the submissions comparing Ellen Pao to Kim Jong-Il or Mao Zedong, would you say reddit widely supports this comparison?
Pretty much the point I'm planning on making to /u/krispykrackers the /r/modnews thread.
Does that fix the problems with the above sentences? Regardless of who was ultimately behind it, the shutdowns were a "I'm taking my ball and going home" move at the expense of the entire Reddit community.
As such, it was entirely justified.
You don't seem to understand how this works. Reddit does not own the community. Reddit hosts the community, and in return the community provides content for Reddit.
The community has already moved from another provider, and if Reddit carries on with more management idiocy, it will move again.
Social is littered with the crumbling ruins of corps that believed they were too big to fail, but which fell off the world after Doing Stupid Shit for too long.
The people who are complaining the loudest about the site's failures aren't members of the 90% of lurkers - they're members of the 9% of occasional contributors or the 1% of prolific contributors. And they're the ones that will make or break the site, so blowing them off as "not the majority" seems like a really awful idea.
People have been exploring options for years. I've got a few spots / candidates myself.
As in order to attract most of them a single site would need to both be able to handle the traffic and have a broad appeal across subjects. Maintaining such a site with that much headroom for users with only their current user base to generate ad revenue I assume is problematic and I would be surprised if any single site currently could handle a mass migration like that (except maybe Tumblr which I have my doubts would appeal to this portion of the Reddit population).
So while a mass exodus could take place people would likely scatter to different sites, which might not make any single other site 'it' enough to attract the remaining masses. Or the exodus takes place over time, which I consider the likely situation, having seen the effective death of many internet communities prior to the beast which is Reddit.
If they leave over time Reddit doesn't need to ask what it should do when the 10 leaves, it needs to ask what it should do when the 10 starts to leave.( my guess would be they need to get them to stop leaving, or get others to step up and take their place as people that feel strongly about the site in its then state, or buy the site they are leaving to).
I somewhat lost touch during that period. When I came up for air, it seemed to be HN, StackOverflow, and Reddit (~2009 or so).
Hypocrisy and double standards.
When someone in power silences someone else's speech or expression, then it's correctly a form of censorship, like what management did with r/fatpeoplehate. When the owners, creators or moderators of their own speech or expressions stop producing that content as what many subreddits did in response to r/iama suspending operations, purportedly not out of protest but out of a lack of understanding of a current situation, then it's protest. Censorship is a top-down use of power to silence a majority. Protest is a middle-up form of power to inconvenience a majority to apply pressure to the power holders. They aren't the same.
That's not how I observed the situation honestly. A lot of subreddit mods got flooded with "shut down"-requests and some decided against it, some followed the mass. It wasn't really a hostage-taking, the shutdown has / had widespread support among the user base.