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Comment by aunty_helen | Hacker News Reader

Incredibly impressive to see the community unite with nearly 80% of the subreddits blacked out.

Keep in mind this is 80% of the subreddits that announced would be participating in the event. There are over 3.5 million subreddits altogether, though of course most of them are dead or with a single user.

TIL. I thought reddit had already cracked down on unmoderated subreddits; that if a subreddit didn't have active mods whom the admins could command that they would shut it down.

One however also has to keep in mind that on Reddit you need either a tight-knit topic specific community, or a lot of users to have an active subreddit.

Just randomly clicking around I see that subreddits with ~50k users already qualify for Reddits top 5% largest subreddits.

If you randomly browse subreddits of that size you will notice that for many of them the newest threads are at least days old. So in reality the amount of active subreddits, let's say subreddits that get at least one thread per day or more, is probably in the realm of a few thousand.

Not sure I would consider mods unilaterally shutting down their forums and hiding information that was contributed by millions of other people a triumph for the wider community. Speaking as somebody who only ever visits Reddit when a thread appears in a search result and occasionally replies if the mods didn't implement a policy of automatically deleting posts from outsiders, now the information I need is not there, and neither is the information I contributed. Great win for the community.

I’d say with you being a passive observer, you are clearly not a part of that community.

Voting wise, all communities I’ve seen were pretty overwhelmingly in favor.

That exclusiveness is exactly my point. It seems for some people the "community" is narrowly defined to mean only those who are highly active Reddit users of very specific forums - so much so that they both visit frequently enough and feel strongly enough to vote on voluntary polls about shutting those forums down. The broader community of people who visit the site and post from time to time most likely never saw any of these polls and wouldn't have bothered voting even if they did. I think those people are still part of the community. To me, a city wouldn't be much of a community if the only people whose opinions mattered were those who had the time to attend council meetings.

One who does not vote does not have the privilege of complaining about the outcome.

Rats! I'll stop complaining about the weather then :)

Is there a vote on the weather I've been missing out on? I thought the guy on TV just gets to choose.

There are only a handful of subs that voted against or are generally against it and it's all ironic, toxic, and shit post subs like nbacirclejerk, 4chan, etc.

The Ukraine war ones are also some against. I have mixed feelings about that.

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