We're closing our sub. Farewell. (self.WatchRedditDie)

submitted 15 hours ago by Potens_Loqui[M]9105& 2 more - announcement

The r/WatchRedditDie moderator team regrets to inform our community that we have, in fact, watched Reddit die and, as such, will move into an archived mode. This company continues strongly with Chinese money and mystery investors, but it has systematically abandoned all its founding principles in search of a massive payday in the form of an IPO. Indeed, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have gone so far as to renege on their promise of listing Aaron Swartz among Reddit, Inc's founders. Such an egregious breach of contract - only performed once their agreed-upon co-founder no longer walked the earth - could only be carried out by immoral individuals acting in fundamental bad faith. In this way and so many others, Reddit is dead.

Reddit is a leader in nothing good and everything seedy. Big Tech has led society down a hole that any objective observer can say has made the Internet far, far worse. The discussions that were allowed in 2005 cannot be had except in the most extreme corners today. This has fostered some of the worst in humanity. Religious and anti-religious zealotry, politics with violence, glorification of disease-based deaths, glorification of homicides and suicides. Entire networks of the Internet are devoted to all of these things - and they're growing. With no pushback from broader minds, we suffer the consequences of Big Tech's offshoot echo chambers. Reddit has positioned itself as one of the biggest proponents of this sort of world. Had it done this from Day 1, no one would have ever heard of it. The presence of WatchRedditDie no longer serves a purpose. It began as a protest against Reddit, Inc's acquiescence to Germany's demands of censorship. It moved into becoming a space that solely moderated based upon the explicit rules of the content policy - nothing more. That invited racism and hateful posts/comments, but Reddit allowed it.

But as the content policy evolved, so did WRD. Yet that wasn't enough. Soon, Reddit staff began to make vague demands while refusing to answer specific questions. The goal was clear: either WRD would become systematically neutered or it would run afoul of some hidden rule. Worse yet, the sole citation for why these unique rules had been created was the history of WRD - that we moderated according to their own content policy without giving them further free labor was cause for punishment for the WRD community. All moderator efforts to shift with the sands of Reddit staff were met with obstinance and continued bad faith behavior, unfortunately.

Reddit is not a place for open discourse. It is not a place for good, reliable, or quality information. It is not organic and it is not genuine. The inauthenticity of its content is a reflection of its inauthentic leadership and staff. Everything it once stood for is as alive as its co-founder Aaron Swartz. If it ever makes money, it won't be due to some positive contribution to society or the Internet. It will be because its current CEO and 2 of its 3 founders - Huffman and Ohanian - are greedy. Rather than create something useful for more than bad memes and various governmental propaganda (with plenty of untamed CSAM mixed in), these bad-faith actors have foisted yet another Big Tech corporation onto the social and political landscape, and its only goal is to make money on Wall Street.

On behalf of our mod team, we have been constantly targeted by Admins, who have acted unprofessionally and in bad faith. We have been forced to enable hilariously strict restrictions for the users of this subreddit, and even then Admins kept finding more ways to give this subreddit stricter restrictions. We have noticed a lot of complaints about your messages being automatically filtered, and ironically enough, that's something that this subreddit was trying to fight against. If it wasn't for the Admins, we would have never set such filters for this subreddit. We were forced to keep these restrictions, as we were threatened with account suspension otherwise.

Admins' unprofessionalism is really glowing on this site. They are unresponsive and incompetent. As an example, one of the moderators in another subreddit got their moderator powers removed from the subreddit by Admins themselves because that said moderator didn't read the modmail he was given. The funny thing? That said moderator didn't even have modmail permissions to read Admins' messages. You don't need to be a moderator of a right-leaning subreddit to be aware of Admins' incompetence.

It has definitely been an interesting run with this subreddit and with its members. Unfortunately, we are permanently closing this subreddit and letting it be archived. Please join our Discord server at https://discord.gg/rgtDrzUpBq for further communication. For now, we are unsure for how long the Discord will be kept around.

The Internet is objectively worse than it has ever been and Reddit has helped make that so. Farewell, friends.