25
votes
Reddit's /r/history closed down for 24 hours in protest against Reddit's lack of anti-racist policies
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- Title
- /r/history is closing down for the next 24 hours in response to current events and reddit's response as a platform
- Authors
- creesch
- Word count
- 243 words
The thing with these blackouts is that for normal people just browsing reddit, the blackouts are hard to notice. Front page feeds always fill up with new content unless you have very few communities in your listings.
I think this is a very ineffective way of spreading the message that belies a lack of understanding of how reddit functions as a site. I'm not surprised the mods of the some of the largest communities on the site don't understand the site better.
What you need for visibility on an issue is more activity and more content with higher vote counts while filtering out as much content that doesn't align with your agenda as possible.
It'd be much more effective to turn these communities into active communities that only allow content on the topic they want to promote. And they should allow as low-effort and easily consumable content as possible to get the widest reach on reddit.
If you solicit a response from reddit's administration, the only thing they've caved to in the past is massive media attention. You get that attention not by doing less in a hard-to-notice way, but by mass outpourings of content with the same specific message.
This is even more true after reddit switched to the "best" sorting for front pages for logged-in users. That sorting hides posts after it thinks the user has seen them, so a post like this might only show up for a single load of their front page.
In the end, reddit has switched to a site that's being optimized for quick entertainment content. A lot of the ways it does that are directly opposite of what you'd want if your goal is distributing information and keeping it accessible. Like you said, the best way to get a message out would probably be to turn a high-quality subreddit into one that allows a bunch of memes on the topic or something, which is ridiculous.
What if the subreddit was already built around something like high-quality memes? Asking for a friend.
Seriously though, I've taken HQG private before, and I think it negatively effects Reddit ad revenue or something, because I'll get a message from admins pretty quick about it. I've got the whole sub locked for at least 24 hours right now. It's not much, but I guess it's something.
Yet here we are, talking about it. I think their statement was noticed, and therefore effective.
I blacked out a small niche website for one day, that gets well under 1k uniques a day.
I got an email from a teacher asking for some information off the site, saying her class supports convicting police officers who murdered George Floyd, but her students had been looking forward to looking at my website all year, because they had not been able to solve the first problem on the first page, and asking if I could send her the information by email.
If blanking out my website elevates a discussion with one teacher in one class, I feel like it was worth it. How much more is that true of a subreddit like AskHistorians?
OK, I probably just need more sleep because this is the second post in a row where I read the title as something completely different from what's in the post. From the link:
The title of this post makes it sound like the mods of /r/history are racists who don't like Reddit's anti-racist policies. But in reality, they think that the policies either don't go far enough or aren't being enforced well enough.
Not just them, a lot of subreddits have been doing this. I noticed r/music and r/hiphopheads did this yesterday as well.
Is there a more general link or location that we could point this to instead? /r/history is significant, but many other major subreddits are taking similar actions as well, and it would be good to show the overall scope instead of just a single subreddit. This comment in /r/AskHistorians has a list of some of the other ones.
If there's nothing existing, maybe I could convert this to a text post so other examples could be edited in?
This headline makes it seem like they're protesting in favor of racism. I was very confused, as I didn't expect that from that particular subreddit. What they're actually saying is that Reddit doesn't enforce anti-racist policies to the extent they should despite professing to be anti-racism.
The title is misleading. They are protesting reddit's lack of anti-racist actions.
thanks thanks. im kinda just trying to post, and its hard to read/figure out everything.
Thanks!