ErraticDragon

They can throw money at it until it works out. Mods do good things, but the bulk of the work is relatively mindless, and easy to outsource.

Anyone saying that they wouldn't was lying. Spez has a history of lying.

Here's what they said on June 7:

###Blackout

• We respect your right to protest – that’s part of democracy.
• This situation is a bit different, with some leading the charge, some users pressuring . We’re trying to work through all of the unique situations.
• Big picture: We are tolerant, but also a duty to keep Reddit online.
• If people want to do this out of anger, we want to make sure they’re mad for accurate reasons, not over things that are untrue. That’s a loss for everyone.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/143rk5p/-/jnbjtsc/

It might push more power users away. It won't push away the teeming masses.

Quality will suffer, but they'll keep their traffic.

There are tools to help. The best recommended ones I know of:

A Rust CLI app: https://github.com/andrewbanchich/shreddit/

A JavaScript bookmarklet (that feels a bit like a full browser extension): https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite

They did say that they would do it, after all.

At this point I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit has put rate-limiting in place to prevent mass actions like that.

Normally I wouldn't give their engineers enough credit to figure something like that out, but in this case rate-limiting already exists for posts, comments, chat, etc.

That's not really the point, though. A strike works because the strikers are willing to lose their pay to force action. If the strikers can be replaced, then the strikers lose.

What you're saying is true: the strikers in this case have nothing to lose.... except their partial control of Reddit. And Reddit will gladly take that from them.

Once the subs are reopened, any ongoing strike will amount to angry people with no power shouting into the void.

Breaking strikes also works, unfortunately. Look at Air Traffic Controllers with Reagan, or the Pinkertons back in the late 19th century. If there's a way to force compliance, they will. And there is.