A long time ago, I played an MMORPG that was scheduled to shut down the beta world. That feeling, in the last moments, of everything around you seeming just as before, but knowing that this could be the last time ever you’re seeing that world. That community.
I’m getting the same feeling looking at reddit right now.
Sure, the blackout might fizzle. The admins might be forced to recant, most subreddits might return. Even if they don’t, reddit could survive in some form.
… or a digg apocalypse is repeated, and we’re all presently witnessing the last moments before the bombs fall and nothing will ever be as it used to be.
A strange feeling, standing on the precipice of Internet history.
They could do that for the big ones. At the time I write this, 1190 of 5563 subreddits have gone dark. Many of them smaller communities I’m only hearing of for the first time. Some small communities I know and love, but reddit admins don’t give a crap about. Some are perhaps revolving around one active enthusiast maintainer. If they die, they’re not coming back. At least not on reddit. They’ll be gone, and I’ll miss them. And I’ll welcome them on Lemmy or another network with open arms. But what once was, will never be again. Not quite the same.
It’s a small feeling. It’s a personal feeling. A feeling of change.
A memento mori.
Said this elsewhere but they can do that for a couple of major subreddits. But once the list of mods they need to replace gets too large, it’ll be chaos. Also mods will likely take their tools and bot setups with them. So it’s not quite so simple just to promote new mods.
At best, the revived subreddits will be pretty dead for awhile or will have very poor moderation. Like do you see how bad the admins are at handling the platform management? How well do you think reddit can pick community mods? Not well.
And the more holes open up the fewer hand selected mods they’ll have available to plug those holes