I think a different approach would work better at this point.
They need to stay up but use their subreddits to publicly plan Reddit "exits" for each community. Subreddits should start polls on where migrate to (discord, lemmy, mastodon, etc etc), and then start systematically cross posting anything posted to their subreddit to the new space, with comments turned off on the Reddit version.
The key in a negotiation is to have a crystal clear, realistic picture of the other party's constraints, motivations and ethical framework. In this case, it's clear Huffman has hard constraints around making Reddit profitable. He could easily do it by reducing headcount but that itself would defeat the purpose because it would devalue the IPO (who wants to buy a shrinking company?). He clearly has no moral or ethical compulsion here. So there isn't another option than to threaten what really matters to him: it has to be made real for Huffman that he's going to lose this if he doesn't budge. The only thing that will convince him is actually seeing users permanently leave.
If my favorites subreddits go to Discord, I'll simply not go there. Discord has nothing to do like a forum, it is almost impossible to search for valuable information, and is really hard to use when dozens and dozens of people are talking simultaneously.
I really don't get why so many people want their sub to go to Discord tbh.
same here, totally mystified. One of my favorite subreddits went over to Discord and apart from the UI/UX being horrific, it doesn't seem to replicate much of the Reddit experience. It's just a giant chat session with a few subtopics it's a cesspool of animated emojis etc.
I like Discord but I get that it's not for everybody. Jumping into a very active wide Discord community (with many channels) can be an incredibly jarring sensory assault, and if you don't have a narrower community (e.g. a private server for just your friend group, or honestly just a server with very few channels to keep track of) to figure out things, it can be very off-putting.
That said, the reason why so many people want to go to Discord is pretty hard to miss: out of all the alternatives, it's the one with critical mass now. Even if everyone is distributed across different servers (to be clear to those less familiar, a server is not a physical/virtual host) and cannot directly interact with one another, the network effects are readily apparent.
"They need to stay up but use their subreddits to publicly plan Reddit "exits" for each community. Subreddits should start polls on where migrate to (discord, lemmy, mastodon, etc etc), and then start systematically cross posting anything posted to their subreddit to the new space, with comments turned off on the Reddit version."
That takes way more determination and organization than the vast majority of Reddit users are capable of. A couple day blackout is really just about what they can manage, and just about what most Reddit users will tolerate.
I would be absolutely shocked if this whole thing doesn't blow over in a couple of weeks, though I also wouldn't be surprised if Reddit's owners didn't compromise in some way either.
Interesting. But I'd say it still fits with the narrative. 5% is a good "we practice fiscal constraint" message. To get back to a reasonable cost basis, they need to lay off 50%, which would send a totally different message.
>They need to stay up but use their subreddits to publicly plan Reddit "exits" for each community.
I have to wonder if this would be allowed, in the past this has only been tried for subreddits that feared being banned in an imminent fashion. On the other hand, you have rules against mods purposefully destroying their own communities, and trying to force an off-site migration in a heavy-handed fashion (eg. stopping user contributions/participation) may be seen as running afoul of these rules.
They need to stay up but use their subreddits to publicly plan Reddit "exits" for each community. Subreddits should start polls on where migrate to (discord, lemmy, mastodon, etc etc), and then start systematically cross posting anything posted to their subreddit to the new space, with comments turned off on the Reddit version.
The key in a negotiation is to have a crystal clear, realistic picture of the other party's constraints, motivations and ethical framework. In this case, it's clear Huffman has hard constraints around making Reddit profitable. He could easily do it by reducing headcount but that itself would defeat the purpose because it would devalue the IPO (who wants to buy a shrinking company?). He clearly has no moral or ethical compulsion here. So there isn't another option than to threaten what really matters to him: it has to be made real for Huffman that he's going to lose this if he doesn't budge. The only thing that will convince him is actually seeing users permanently leave.