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.
Maybe they just don’t know about all that? In my experience, most people are empathetic and willing to do things that make the world better, and when they operate against that goal, it’s usually ignorance rather than malice or a lack of empathy.
Most people don’t know what an API is and all they know is reddit is doing a thing to make 3rd party apps have to pay to keep existing. Most people don’t use 3rd party apps (assuming they even know what that means), and it makes sense to most people that Reddit would charge a little bit for API access because it costs them money to maintain it.
When you don’t understand that those prices are way higher than normal, you don’t understand that this is likely a deliberate move to kill competition, and when you don’t understand what an API is, then you won’t understand that moderation tools and accessibility tools depend on it.
And when you don’t understand that this API pricing is so important, you won’t have a reason to go research it well enough to understand it.
It’s not an empathy issue, it’s an information issue, and as much as people like to always say it’s not the responsibility of people who understand issues to discuss it with those who don’t, I don’t know how we expect people to learn things otherwise? Regardless of if it’s anyone’s responsibility, it’s certainly more practically effective to be empathetic towards people and strike up earnest discussions about things like this rather than throwing around insults because they aren’t lucky enough to have the information you have.