This is a rant post and I apologize but I had to talk about this. Most subs are coming back online and not saying ANYTHING about the next steps. Only a handful of subs are going indefinite. I checked the front page for the first time today after leaving the a couple hours before the day of the blackout and what do I see? Subs are up, and comments and upvotes are up to the general average before the blackout.
I checked r/gaming to see their recent post (WHICH HAS OVER 68k UPVOTES), and I see a comment with over 500 upvotes saying in a nutshell, “You guys need to calm down, they’re a company and need to make money”.
Along with a couple other comments saying similar things. Are you fucking serious? You can’t even have the fucking balls to say, “This is a company that has consistently screwed over its users and I need to take a stand and quit my addiction”? You’re just gonna sit and do nothing? Fuck you. You’re no fucking better than u/spez. You’re all a bunch of fucking hypocritical liars for shitting on spez and the admins while talking about how you’re “done” with Reddit and you won’t support this.
Go touch grass you fucking addicted cowards. I’m glad I made the switch to Lemmy if it means I don’t have to interact with dumbfucks like you.
I was a union organizer for a while, and I see some loose similarities with the API shenanigans and the blackout.
It’s always the militant 2-5% that’s ready to go to the mattresses agitating for action getting backed up by another 5-10% that are a little more pragmatic.
The remaining 85% is made up of people you’d almost believe are managmenet plants and others who seem to simply accept that management’s point of view is automatically correct. You know. Libs.
A protracted thing with management can almost never happen because of that dynamic. Assuming you can even get a critical mass of people assembed as a show of force in the first place, the whole thing starts coming undone if there’s not immediate results.
The rank and file will abandon you the moment it takes more effort than doing literally nothing. The shills who got in your way the entire time will say they told you so. The libs will be like “good try, gang. we really got that conversation started! Guess we better get back to work, huh?” The vanguard will be upset that more aggressive measures weren’t taken. The pragmatic group will try salvaging and spinning what they can.
Some time down the road, those slippery slopes the activated 15% warned about will turn out to, indeed, be slippery. The shills will not recignize or acknowledge the fact. The libs will go all pikachu face. The pragmatic activists will invoke past struggle and try to cobble together a response. The vanguard will have stopped organizing out of frustration or burnout, and a new one will have take. its place
In a way, the current Reddit situation feels analagous to that.
Damn I felt this in my bones. I am a union organizer at my hospital and those numbers are bang on… Out of a department of 100 or so there is usually me being the union person, and MAYBE I can get 1 or 2 other people to do certain things at certain times, and about 5-10 people to participate in an in person action that isnt a strike… And the other people are happy to get the benefits but dont want to put in any effort or “risk” at all.
We actually did have a 1 day strike 3 years ago and I’d say even then 3-5% of the people crossed the picket line to work, maaaaybe 50% of the nurses showed up in person outside the hospital, and the other 50% just cant be bothered to interrupt their life at all.
We are very tactical with our stuff and it was only a 1 day strike (although it does have ramifications for about 5 days because of staffing contracts)… If it was an open ended strike I bet the number of people that would be active in it would immediately fall to your stated 15% or so outside of the first week
Bread and circuses. Things only change when you cut those off. Why do you think there were giant protests in 2020? We lost the bread (tons of industries were indefinitely on pause overnight) and we lost the circuses (entertainment like sports also vanished). Lasting change happened in the past because people were literally starving and people had nothing to keep them going. Even then, you can get a North Korea situation once in a while, where they’re paradoxically starving to death and still compliant.
Politics aside in any case, it’s the “the rank and file will abandon you the moment it takes more effort than doing literally nothing”.
Chills, well said
Go to the…mattresses?
Were you a union organizer for sex workers?
It’s a Godfather quote, meaning “prepare for battle”. In times of war, families would pay for soldiers to guard them and sleep on the floor in shifts. Hence “go to the mattresses”.
Actually it’s a bit of a recursive quote because there’s a scene in “You Got Mail” where the male protagonist tells the female protagonist to “Go to the mattresses” and she’s equally confused. He explains the Godfather thing. This is all said via AOL message. She later mentions that she will “Go to the mattresses” to her real life boyfriend, and asks him if he knows what that means. He answers “Yeah, like from the Godfather”. She concludes with the statement “What is it with men and the Godfarher?”
Incidentally I’m not a man, and here we are.
Are you teasing the IU 690, comrade?