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Comment by mhomde | Hacker News Reader

What a circus reddit has become. There's probably/hopefully more to this story but still. It will be interesting to see if reddit forces the hands of the biggest subreddits to open again.

Which raises an interesting question, who "owns" a subreddit, the mods? the subscribers? reddit? I also wonder if it's a good idea for a community like reddit to have "public facing" administrators

Many of the biggest subreddits are revolting against the "governing" and gone private in protest, for example:

/r/Iama

/r/science

/r/movies

/r/gaming

/r/history

/r/art

/r/AskReddit

/r/law

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If /r/aww, /r/funny and /r/pics did the same, Reddit's traffic would fall off a cliff.

/r/pics has joined in.

And /r/funny is now in.

And it would be such a better site.

I'm actually surprised that reddit allows default subreddits to go private or disable themselves in any way. Each community should absolutely be able to moderate themselves, but at the same time being a default subreddit carries extra responsibilities.

I think a lot of the reddit administration tools, subreddit settings etc is still is catching up to its popularity

Carries extra responsibilities with no actual rewards.

Reddit is run by volunteers, remember...

> a default subreddit carries extra responsibilities.

Tell that to the admins that just cut a beloved person without prior consultation or a continuity plan.

I'm blown away by what Reddit has been doing in the last few months. I thought it was just me being a get-off-my-lawn old user (since I've been on Reddit like 7-8 years or something) but then I had a young copyrighter (early twenties) talking to me about leaving Reddit for "other places" and that blew me away. I hadn't realized it was starting to trickle down for lack of better words.

>Tell that to the admins that just cut a beloved person without prior consultation or a continuity plan.

Let's think about the fact that this is possible for a company to do this to a full-time employee with several years experience next time an election comes up.

Unfortunately, not all of us get the luxury of advance notice on firings/layoffs

You're missing the part about how many things that said person was responsible for are floundering because the admins fired a person that was a single-point-of-failure without any backup plan.

It's like firing someone, then all of the sudden you realize that you need to hire a team of people to replace them, all while your site is down and your servers are on fire (and all of the MBAs are busy looking for someone else to blame so they don't get fired).

You seem to be making a statement about the law - I don't think anyone is suggesting that what Reddit has done here is against the law. Instead, what Reddit has done here strikes many people as rather stupid.

I don't think what Reddit did is illegal, I'm lamenting that it isn't. Independent of skillsets, people should get treated with a minimum of respect.

Even in countries where an employer has to give advance notice that just means they have to continue to pay the fired employee. That person can still be sent home if the employer prefers that over the employer continuing their job or training their replacements.

This is an edge case that probably nobody thought about until today. I imagine the ability to take a default sub private will not last through tomorrow.

> being a default subreddit carries extra responsibilities.

Mostly filtering whichever collection of racists and woman-haters show up when they become defaults. So at least their moderators are getting a break from that.

I am also surprised. I wonder what this is going to do for their SEO because there is a lot of content now missing once googles bot gets to some of these pages.

And the number just keeps growing:

https://www.reddit.com/live/v6d0vi6c8veb

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