No, we will not be going dark. The reasons are simple:
This form of protest has proven ineffective on reddit repeatedly.
Shutting down the sub on a Monday will have an adverse impact on our readers, including possible production issues.
We have avoided reddit “politics” intentionally and will continue to do so.
You are more than welcome to avoid participating on that day which will make the message far clearer to reddit through their metrics than shutting down the sub to folks in need who would be here anyways.
It’s disappointing to see the r/sysadmin mods take this stance, but I guess in a way it’s a good thing that they’ve shown their true colors.
Here’s hoping that c/sysadmin thrives and replaces it in the near future as the go-to place for all sysadmin stuff.
Absolute shit take on their part, and a 2-day blackout is the least that they could do. Everyone’s systems won’t go down in flames because /r/sysadmin isn’t there for people to whine about how they hate their jobs for a few days. If there’s some major vulnerability being exploited on those days, mainstream news and other tech news sites will pick it up.
However, they’re not entirely wrong on the first point. I remembered the 2015 blackout to protest the firing of Victoria the AMA admin and other stuff about Ellen Chao (honestly don’t remember or care what it was all about), and it was huge. Most subreddits went dark. Reddit didn’t hire Victoria back. If I recall there was a PR statement, and everyone moved on with their lives.
When I was searching for that I found that reddit has had a handful of other blackouts since - one about the SOPA bill (which I seem to recall), another about COVID (which I don’t), etc. - and as far as I can tell the most that all of those blackouts ever did was generate press.
They’re already at that point - reddit’s tenuous situation with their devaluation and the API nonsense has been all over the news, from Ars Technica, to CNN and Reuters. And really I don’t think it’s going to change anything either. Reddit’s going public, the stakeholders will have their say, and the site is going to be monitized and crapified, the users be damned.
But again, going dark for 2 days is, IMO, ethically required. For that matter, they should stay dark until reddit changes course.
Oh well, now we have Lemmy. :)
Whether it changes Reddit’s course or not, the solidarity of people in protecting their interests against giant organizations that control stuff is pretty much always a good thing in the end. Assholes in power need to be reminded of what happens when they treat people poorly, and if that means bankrupting the richest man in the world and destroying our favorite website on the eve of its IPO, so be it. Long live federated decentralized open source!
Yeah, my hope is that reddit is about to enter the “find out” phase. If they only stick to a 2 day blackout however (or snub it like the /r/sysadmin mods), things are going to get right back to status quo real quick unfortunately.
I seem to remember protests about reddit stopping subs from using custom CSS worked, at least temporarily.
I think I remember that one, but did it reach blackout phase? I thought there was just much general negativity about it until reddit reversed course. That one didn’t necessarily make them money I don’t think, they just intended to “vanilla-ize” the site.
Part of me thinks an element of this is just to try and tank the share value out of spite, since it’s the only thing that major sub shutdowns could potentially achieve.