What a great idea. Just use an algorithm to ban any unprofitable user. Can't lose!

Honesty I think the big political subs are incredibly bot infested. Political content is an amazing way to make people mad and get them to spend more time on a platform, increasing engagement and letting reddit deliver more ads. It's not like it would be the first time they used bots to drive engagement and make communities look bigger.

Ah. So basically China's Social Credit system, but for Reddit.

I can't imagine a website so anti-CCP it utterly internalized the social credit meme (despite it being somewhat more nuanced in reality, I still don't approve of it, just learned it gets exaggerated in the west) would take well to an invisible 'reputation system' that demands data collection and punishes privacy actions.

The vibes continue to deteriorate.

To try and be charitable to the WPT mods: that sub is a magnet for bots and bad actors. All those measures sound like a shotgun approach to combating spam to me.

I really don't envy having to moderate a large politically oriented sub like that. I imagine it burns you out fast to being open and fair-minded in how you approach moderation due to the sheer avalanche of bullshit you're confronted with cleaning up.

Reddit execs don't care when people post like this. They aren't browsing the sub, all they see is user engagement is back up and that's a win. They can sell that to advertisers as a win. If you showed them the page they'd think it's weird but they probably wouldn't know it have ever been any different.

The only win to be had with the sub re-opening is to post nothing at all.

There is the nuance to it. The subscribers did not sign up for this initially. Therefore they will have to build a new community up which certainly won't have as many subscribers for a very long time and none of the post history.

At the same time posts actually asking about the Steam platform get downvoted heavily and thus dissuade further interaction.

Effectively the sub becomes useless, just the same as if it had stayed closed. It will drop in engagement in the long term.

The John Oliver memes attract more mainstream attention and clearly signal to investors the platform is not healthy, irrespective of the traffic it causes.

With more and more subreddits joining in on this, the All page gets flooded with shitposts annoying everyone. Those who stay certainly won't want to deal with this all the time and unsubscribe.

Of course group dynamics are unpredictable at times, but reddit is certainly more in turmoil than whatever traffic.

Not really. The traffic they're getting from it is unsustainable and any would-be investor who is paying attention will notice this. This is really more a tactic to shatter the narrative that the mods do not represent the will of the general user and they are forcing the protests onto them.

r/art is now only allowing artsy John Oliver pics...

People will eventually stop visiting if a subreddit no longer contains content that is interesting for them.

u/spez tries to paint it was just mods trying to be powertripping and not standing for the communities. This refutes the sentiment along with the reactions of /r/pics and the likely coming r/aww action.