I find it Fucking hilarious. Especially the "community of 30 million John Oliver enthusiasts" LMAO. I was really depressed when this all started, I will really miss Reddit Sync, but the fediverse seems like the beginnings of a better reddit to me and the drama has some bright spots like the above lol. Wonderful!
I'm torn, on one hand this is hilarious and if they didn't do this the admins would just change the moderators to someone who would run it. On the other hand, Reddit got what it wanted: the sub has reopened, posts are flowing, ads are being served and Reddit is making money.
i honestly doubt that the traffic R/pics had before this change will stay.
this is the best way honestly even better than restricted it will effectively hurt the traffic while they ( officially ) cant be dicks i mean they still can but you know.
Reddit could put a bot that just cycles through reposts from the last 15 years in the top 50 subs and the front page (and just bot-paste articles on all the news and politics subs) and the FP would be indistinguishable to the average r/all lurker.
All subs should do something like this...Reddit want the mods back or they get removed. So bring the subs back but change the sub rules to be insane shit like this. Comply to Reddit's rules but with your own rules.
Small example, one niche sub I loved was r/retroAR. It's where people share old AR15s or clones of old AR15s. They had pretty strict definition of what considered "retro", a fixed carry handle being a main part if it. In protest they are allowing non-carry handle posts and there was some wacky builds being posted.
It's a funny protest, but it kinda goes against the spirit of the API boycott.
I'll give it a week before Reddit goes back to normal. Spez is probably going to do some overtime and start forcefully deposing moderators.
And as we saw with /r/worldnews, /r/leagueoflegends and pretty much any other subreddit that refused to even acknowledge the initial blackout, there are power users that are more than willing to lick Spez's boots.
yeah, it's funny but at the end of the day all reddit cares about are their pageviews, engagement, and active daily users. They don't care whether people are posting "real" pics or john oliver pics, as long as they're posting