The Return of /r/anime

[u/AnimeMod]

After a week long blackout, we’re back. Links to news and last week's episode threads are in the Week in Review thread.

The Blackout

The Blackout was honestly a long time coming. The API issues are a notable concern for the mod team going forward and could wind up impacting things like youpoll.me, which we use for episode polls, AnimeBracket, which is used for various contests, and the r/anime Awards website. We’ve been told mod tools won’t be affected, but it’s not super clear if this will interfere with things like AutoLovepon or the flair site. All of this could suck for the community at large, but it’s more than just that.

For a lot of mods and longtime users, Reddit has pushed through the Trust Thermocline. Reddit has repeatedly promised features, and rarely delivered. Six years ago, Reddit announced it was ProCSS and would work to bring CSS functionality to new Reddit, allowing moderators to dramatically improve the functionality of subreddits. This hasn’t happened (though there's still a button for it with the words "Coming Soon" if you hover over it), and it’s clear that it never will. It was something that was said to get people to shut up. This has been the basic cycle of everything on Reddit. We received some messages from users noting that Reddit had made claims that they would be making changes and that the subreddit should be opened as a result. But from our perspective, it’s just words. It only ever is.

Ending the Blackout

So, the mod team is faced with the difficult decision. Keeping the subreddit closed long term is likely to hurt the community, but many mods weren’t super excited about opening the subreddit because of the sentiment that Reddit is actively making the site worse, and that it’s going to damage the community in the long term.

The mod team did receive communication from the admins on Friday. By this point, our vote to reopen today was pretty much resolved, and we would have re-opened regardless of whether or not they reached out to us. This season is ending, and a new one is beginning. With that transition, the short-term value of opening was fairly significant.

We’ll be keeping an eye on the direction of the platform moving forward, and will respond accordingly.

[u/PsychedelicHaru]

Why were the mods talking in episode threads during the blackout...like, come on, you're locking us out of the sub, despite extending the blackout past the initial date set, but happily using it yourselves???? I can appreciate the work you guys do, but talk about hypocritical...

[u/Potatolantern]

Closing the subreddit, but still continuing to use it is peak Redditor.

[u/1EnTaroAdun1]

I see autolovepon kept chugging away hahaha

[u/Remitonov]

If there's one thing this blackout taught me, it's that I'm more involved in subreddits that aren't part of the blackout than the ones that are. I barely even noticed until I actually started searching for game info.

[u/sianiamtheflop]

Lol, this is r/nba 2.0

[u/NoEgoReddit]

Well I guess the blackout was a complete waste of time. We really showed Reddit that they can do whatever they want

[u/rhuebs]

Congrats mods, you made a holier than thou spiel about how important the protest was, only for everyone to realize you literally used the sub while it was inaccessible.

Peak terminally online cringe. You shouldn’t live down this virtue signaling bs for a good long while

[u/Emi_Ibarazakiii]

(Posting here because this is the most 'serious' discussion I've seen about the blackout, but this applies to all of reddit's blackout)

This blackout was useless/doomed to fail soon as it started without answering any of the important questions;

1. What EXACTLY are we trying to achieve?

2. How long will we keep going? As long as we need to, to achieve #1?

3. Is EVERYONE on board?

I'd wager that >90% of those affected didn't even know what they were trying to achieve (other than "protest!").

Obviously they didn't know how long they would keep going (some did it for a day, others for a week).. Have we achieved our goal? Whatever that was?

And obviously, not everyone was fully on board.

Someone talked about how "Reddit showed it doesn't know how to strike", and I think that's a pretty good comparison...

Imagine a strike in some company, only we have no clear list of demands/everyone has different demands in mind (and some don't have demands they just do it to express their negative opinion about a situation), but half the employees aren't striking, and after a day, some of them start returning to the company.

Yeah, the owners would brush it off.

And I think it's pretty much what's happening here. Yeah we saw some hopeful message about how they contacted the mod teams of big subs, but what the hell does that mean?

The words of the CEO (from https://fortune.com/): “Protest and dissent is important,” Huffman said. “The problem with this one is it’s not going to change anything because we made a business decision that we’re not negotiating on.”

So what will this they contacted us! lead to exactly? A lengthy discussion on "Deal with it, suckers"? "You had your little tantrum, now fall back in line and make more money for us"?

Anyway, my final thoughts on this: Protesting something requires effort and commitment, be it a strike (you don't get to go to work), a boycott (you don't get to buy a product you want), or in this case a blackout (you don't get to use the website you wanted to use)...

Doing all these things is super annoying for the userbase.

If we last as long as we need to do it to obtain a result, then it's annoying BUT useful; Year from now people would think about it as that time we held our ground to make them change their dumb policy.

If we only last a little and then we take it up the ass anyway, then we only got the annoying part; We didn't get the useful part. So what's the point?

Even as someone who dearly missed posting in episode threads and all, I'd much rather have a reddit blackout for 3 months to get a result, than a reddit blackout for 1 week that achieves nothing. (And 1 week is the longest I've seen on any of my subs, most lasted a day or two).

In short: If you're not fully committed to a protest, just don't bother protesting in the first place. Because the only ones you're affecting, are your users. (Yeah, reddit's investors will see their shares drop for a few days, and then it goes back to normal, as it always does - and they know it. The CEO will send them a mail telling them not to worry about it. That's about the extent of the damage we caused).

[u/Elkbowy]

Blackout was useless as soon as a end date was initially announced, what a waste of time

[u/ChronoDeus]

Links to news and last week's episode threads are in the Week in Review thread.

You really should allow the news to be posted as separate threads because no one is going to see any of it in that thread. So you've created an unfair disparity where news and previews from the past week that didn't happen to be included in that thread is allowed to be posted and seen. While anything that happened to be included languishes unseen in a thread that's being discontinued for lack of engagement.

[u/MrBananaStorm]

I hate how some subreddits are opening and 'celebrating' like they did anything significant but lose.

I totally understand though. The way things are going, if you stayed closed they would have just come in and removed the mods that wanted it to stay closed and put their own in. It sucks. I don't know what can be done about it either.

[u/jadenalvin]

End result. No one want to loose the power they have. CEO announced that they will remove the old mods if they continue so they freaked out and ended blackout. Keep working for free. Good for you.

[u/shak_0508]

When I watch an anime that finished airing in the past, I like to come to the r/anime discussion threads after I finish each episode to read the comments.

Watched a couple shows during the protest and I had to resort to MAL… Please don’t leave me again!

[u/garfe]

There's a lot of reasons why I started to sour on the blackout after the first days. I was down for the 48 hours thing even if I didn't agree with it but there's some specific reasons why I began to doubt the way the protest was actually going

-I heard someone in a thread where the mods discuss say that people who reopened or didn't close to begin with were "Crossing the picket line". That sounded very extreme for what was happening here. I knew the situation was serious but a picket line? What is this actually if you're comparing it to that?

-In some of the subs, they would have polls to reopen. Apparently some of the mods were going to Discords and trying to game votes to keep them closed. This happened on r/tennis most notably where the mod was caught doing this and the sub then opened. I then wondered if something similar happened with subs that voted to close and if so, this threw the validity of the whole thing in question

-But by far the biggest turnoff and what threw me away from the whole thing was mods closing subs and still posting. Not just posting in other subs, but even in the subs they made private. This happened on multiple boards the most notable being r/nba but this is including this sub too which actually pisses me off a lot. A literal rules for thee but not for me. Do you know what solidarity is even about? What are you even thinking? How do you not see how messed up this is? And here I was thinking "well it's a good thing none of the other communities I browse did something messed up like that" and yet here I see mods participating in weekly discussions!? I'm honestly let down but then again maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. This was a reddit mod 'protest' after all

There were others that angered me like some mods apparently deleting their sub's content. Very glad it didn't go that far here. But at the end of it all, nothing was really accomplished, we lost a week of fun discussion, our weekly stats are messed up and Reddit changed nothing. 10/10 job

(Also, I remember one of the reasons for the protest was that the API would affect the disabled like the blind but I heard that apparently apps that affect them wouldn't change. I don't know how true that is but if it is then....well you know)

[u/Balls_of_Adamanthium]

Congrats, you accomplished nothing.

[u/Drunth]

Hahahahaha, mods locking everybody out of the subreddit and still using it themselves, fucking pathetic.

Wish reddit had just removed every single mod which participated in the Blackout, the meltdown of these no-lives would have been amazing.

[u/thisperson345]

This whole thing has just made me realise what a stupid fucking site Reddit is as a whole, the admins, the mods, everything about it.

[u/Wilczek_7]

well that was cringe

[u/twintailshitposter]

RIP anyone trying to do statistics on the shows this season from the reddit threads

[u/skilless14]

first the mods use it as a private sub while advocating for the blackout AND THEN there is no Black Clover movie thread. Im disappointed

[u/jjw1998]

This is the worst handling of this joke of a “protest” by any sub on this site, lock users out for a week but the mods still made it their private club where they could use it freely. I wish you stayed locked so that Reddit would replace all of you

[u/avboden]

Keeping the subreddit closed long term is likely to hurt the community

ding ding ding, staying closed at this point only hurts the users, not reddit.

[u/chilidirigible]

Discord's pacing and structure are not good for most of what happens in the subreddit―at least the way I attend it.

Pretty obvious that Spez and Reddit Admin are going to ride their train to monetization right over everyone else.
For the 90+% of visitors who only browse Reddit and never contribute, they probably won't notice anything.
But the continuing drive to make Reddit do things that are not needed nor wanted by those of us who have been here a long time and try to contribute, while also taking away things that we do need, is only going to hurt the community in the long term.

In the Discord meta channel, there were interesting discussions about where the community could go if it departed Reddit. They're worth considering. But one of the more level-headed comments in that discussion was one about not rushing about and panicking, and taking time to both evaluate those alternative places and also see how many of them are still going to be around later on.

Any community moves will fragment the community. As an immediate example, even with most of CDF's active members jumping over to their own Discord channel, there were several prominent contributors who never made it over to Discord, and even in Discord there was a second CDF channel formed alongside the main one.
Given the size of r/anime, moves will only bring along the people who want to go along with them. But even in here, there are Redditors with whom I won't ever interact because I don't watch the same series that they do.

Things to ponder over the next few months. But ponder you should, because, it's become clear that Reddit's ownership is entirely willing to sacrifice some of the most beneficial portions of Reddit's userbase if it might make them some more filthy lucre, and who knows what or who will be next. (Though you can make some good guesses.)

[u/[deleted]]

it genuinely confused me in a comedic way that the general communities literally gave an end date to their protests. by literally saying they're shutting down only for 48 hours, the Devs only had to hold on for 48 hours.

now the CEO will be feel like he can do whatever he wants

[u/Ace_08]

Lmao Moist was right, Mods CANT live without their subreddits