To try and be charitable to the WPT mods: that sub is a magnet for bots and bad actors. All those measures sound like a shotgun approach to combating spam to me.
I really don't envy having to moderate a large politically oriented sub like that. I imagine it burns you out fast to being open and fair-minded in how you approach moderation due to the sheer avalanche of bullshit you're confronted with cleaning up.
I'm an IATSE member (Editor's Guild) and yeah, I think "high skilled workers asking for reasonable compensation parity from streaming platforms forced to use foodbanks for the audacity" definitely fits the spirit of that sub.
I'm not whining about the solidarity. I'm whining about the greedy Studio execs that made this necessary.
Yeah, I bought gold a few times. I had no problem with "this content was so good it inspired me to give back a little to the free service we're all using."
I wouldn't mind some equivalent for the fediverse honestly. Let me donate to the home server of a user who's comment I thought was especially good.
I know you can donate directly, but I do think there was something about also making another user's day that felt good about the Gold system. The service gets some fuel in the tank and the comment author gets a little boost to their mood. It was nice.
I agree it got way too out of hand when they moved beyond Gold though.
Since Relay is still working right now I check back once or twice a day.
After being on Kbin for the last couple weeks, it's amazing to me how shitty and toxic Reddit feels in comparison now. I'm basically only going there to check a couple niche subs, then bounce.
I'm also only commenting to suggest people check out Lemmy/Kbin, haha.
The OCM analogy is that a lot of "wholesome" content points to much deeper and darker systemic issues, but rather than diving into those, such articles only scratch the surface and present their stories in a Rosy light of "Thing turned out good this time!!! Yay!!!", rather than the -- IMO, more appropriate -- light of tearing their hair out and asking "why the fuck is this sort of generosity even needed on an individual level??? Why is society producing this situation in the first place???"
For instance, this article's title could be rewritten as "Writers for multi-billion-dollar streaming platforms, striking over lack of traditional media residuals, forced to resort to good banks during era of record profits" to avoid OCM-syndrome.