They don't care about the users who are making a fuss. In fact, they want those users to leave. They want the complacent social media users who can be easily monitized.
It's a lot like Twitter. Twitter was doing alright prior to Musk. Their user base was as strong and plentiful as ever. There have always been shitty users and toxic corners but Twitter did their best to downplay that and highlight the better parts of their platform. They did their best to walk that fine line between moderation and censorship.
But with Musk spending $44bn so that he could meme without consequence and restore accounts of politically powerful people to gain favor, along with him gutting all of the departments that did the moderation, the site has gone from a legitimate place to interact to a well known cesspool of toxicity that users and corporations are starting to shy away from. Turns out that getting rid of moderators might not be such a good idea.
There are still a great many users on Twitter who are actively participating and that won't change anytime soon. But the ratio of good content to bad has changed and Twitter's reputation both as a company and as a platform has been tarnished. Twitter isn't going anywhere, but many people have grown weary of the antics and moved on. And that's what we're seeing of reddit right now. The only difference is the simultaneous mass, organized exodus of users from reddit vs the more gradual enshitification of Twitter.
Basically what we already know. Reddit is restoring comments that have been deleted by users possibly in violation of data privacy laws.
Louis goes a little farther by sharing the story of one particular user who tried multiple ways to delete their content including manually deleting every single comment one by one. Then to answer Reddit's response that user data is "anonomized" by disassociating it with the user account when the user deletes their account, the user points out that at least one of their posts has their full name in it, and by restoring that post against the user's wishes, they've violated California's data privacy laws.
He then goes into his typical cynical rant which I personally find entertaining but I know he rubs a lot of people the wrong way.
I still remember when people realized that world politics had no specific rules. People just seemed to assume that posts had to be limited to the sub's name until the mod refused to remove an off-topic post and said "it doesn't break any rules". That's when the flood gates opened.
Honestly, Reddit would probably like a few less NSFW subs. They've always had sort of a love-hate relationship with them. They don't want to deal with adult content at all, but they also don't want to go full Tumblr and drive half their user base away.
I just wanted to leave this here (www.reddit.com)
Yep, this is what the future of awards on Reddit looks like
Reddit demands moderators remove NSFW labels, or else (www.theverge.com)
Article by The Verge, providing details about various subreddits and their mods getting threatened because they are labeled as NSFW
This has got to be artificial (media.kbin.social)
Reddit braces for life after API changes (techcrunch.com)
Reddit and its communities are preparing for a life after the platform's API changes forced popular third-party apps to shut down.
Reddit breaks the law to quell protests - spez has gone too far (www.youtube.com)
We reach a new low every day...
18+ /r/interestingasfuck forced open, lowers its standard of what qualifies as "interesting", gets flooded with adult content [NSFW within two clicks] (www.reddit.com)
I think the title speaks for itself.