Apparently r/pics is protesting through malicious compliance; the subreddit is open again, but all content being shown is uninteresting pictures of... who's John Galt Oliver?
And the moderators decided to actually consult their community, on what they should do. You could vote on two options:
Upvote this comment if you want /r/Pics to feature only images of John Oliver looking sexy. As of time of archiving this option was at +51k points.
Upvote this comment if you want to return to normal operation. As of time of archiving this option was -8k points.
Interesting detail on how the r/pics moderators worded it:
Anyway, we – the so-called "landed gentry" – definitely want to comply with the wishes of the "royal court,"
I personally didn't realise that there is such an implication on what Pigboy said - that if he's calling the mods "landed gentry", he sees himself as a king.
EDIT: as other users are pointing out, other subs are doing the same sort of malicious compliance, so I'll share them here:
r/gifs (archive link, (original link). As of time of archiving it has +21k points for John Oliver gifs only, and -5k points for returning to normal
r/art (original link) - as of now (7:20, São Paulo time), votes are still not visible. Same as above, John Oliver vs. normal operations.
r/aww (archive link, original link) - +56k "to only feature John Oliver, Chiijohn, and their lookalikes bein adorable", -2.5k to return to normal.
r/showerthoughts (archive link, original link). Voting on the days that the subreddit should be open or closed.
Thanks for compiling all of this. I'm trying to stay off of reddit completely so as to not add traffic to the site so it's nice to get these snapshots of what's going on there. I'll be staying on Lemmy regardless of the reddit outcome, but part of me hopes for it's downfall so some of my more niche communities will start migrating over here.
I‘m not even his target audience (I‘m further left), but I‘ve seen some clips of his show and he‘s funny, would be neat to have a sort of "Downfall of Corporate Social Media" episode featuring spez. I‘d watch that.
@Spitz how do you not know john oliver? he's the guy that look lime a maniquin with a square head thick accent and a beack nose, used to be on john stewart, but now has his on show on hbo.
I genuinely love the internet some times ... Like what are you doing to protest again? You can hear the Reddit HQ - "Another sub has gone John Oliver guys !".
That’s a fantastic response. Reddit can’t oust the mods for “opting out”, and they can’t claim the sub is unmoderated. Plus it keeps people’s minds on what’s going on. Great idea.
Ditto - I stopped moderating for Reddit years ago, I have a thousand bones to pick with individual moderators in that pigsty, and I still think that they're right protesting against it.
I still think that it's nice to have concrete proof that this is not just "a mod rebellion", the userbase got enough of it.
I won't be back not even if they back down though. Screw that place - Reddit Inc. is a user-hostile company, the powermods issue was never fixed because they don't care about the users, and the Reddit community is only so hostile, stupid, and disingenuous because they took the admins as role model on how they should behave.
It's worth noting that, of the 30000000 million r/pics members/subscribers, less than 50,000 participated. The venn diagram of new lemmy users and the SJO voters is pretty close to a single circle I'd bet.