Like many other subreddits, r/Finland is allowing its users to vote for whether or not they should a) reopen as normal, b) remain closed, or c) remain in protest mode.
However, the admins just sent them a nastygram essentially saying that’s not allowed:
Your community sees well over 2 million unique visitors each month. Allowing a small segment of those users to make a decision for a community forever does not make sense. There are a huge number of people that use this space now and who will in the future
Polling to close is not a viable option that will return a result that resolves this situation
However, mods can also see traffic stats, which show them as closer to 20k uniques per month. My guess is that this is a copy/pasted message and a whole bunch of subreddits are getting this notice.
I thought this was a particularly nasty new development, since up until now the excuse has been that we can’t let these Landed Gentry dictate the state of our subreddits, but now they’re explicitly saying that they also don’t care about how the users of a subreddit vote either.
They gave a fight. If Reddit had just been silent, I bet most of the subs would be open now. Instead, Reddit has fought for every inch and in turn created an enemy to rally against. I was initially bummed and left to support the blackout and figured I’d just reduce my Reddit usage. With how nasty Reddit has acted though, I’m avoiding them as aggressively as possible now.
It kinda looks like when governments pass a stupid law, people react negatively to it and then governments double and triple down with worst stuff.
I had similar thoughts at the beginning. I initially planned to simply manage my Reddit addiction for 2 days (lol).
As the individual subreddits started talking about going black indefinitely, I began to change my mind. When I read the internal memo from spez saying “this will pass” and they demonstrated their complete unwillingness to negotiate, however, that was the end of Reddit for me.
I like your description of them as ‘nasty’ - it’s fitting.