I really don’t think it’s a protest on the part of Minecraft anyway; what they were really saying is that because subs were no longer enforcing rules and content moderation wasn’t happening anymore (or was being actively discouraged) and porn among other things was becoming more prevalent on the site, they didn’t feel comfortable having an official affiliation with Reddit, even if it was only with one sub.
The protest worked in a way, but I wouldn’t give Microsoft credit for actually backing the protests.
I give them tons of credit for this! With Twitter becoming, in my opinion, basically a Nazi echo chamber, the corporate brands and public personalities staying on the platform basically lends it legitimacy. It says “it’s normal to hang out in public places where hate groups thrive and are encouraged”. Microsoft making this choice is sending a public message that Reddit’s conduct is making the place unsafe - that it’s not perfectly normal to hang out in the subreddit that are lacking moderation.
It’s not necessarily a perfect comparison because I think Twitter’s leadership is directly doing things to promote harmful and hateful content, whereas reddit I think is just hurting it’s relationship with its own community, but the throughline is the lack of moderation making the content more extreme.
I’ve been looking for this kind of comment, because this was my first thought on reading the statement. Very PR speak implying that the state of subs like r/interestingasfuck meant that they didn’t want the brand risk that now comes with being on Reddit – not that they cared about or were protesting the API changes.
I do think it’s interesting because it shows that the mod protests on those subreddits - even if brief - triggered a big enough brand risk moment for MSFT/Minecraft to decide dropping Reddit completely (rather than temporarily or similar) was worth it. I don’t think we’ve seen any other brands officially do that yet.
I really don’t think it’s a protest on the part of Minecraft anyway; what they were really saying is that because subs were no longer enforcing rules and content moderation wasn’t happening anymore (or was being actively discouraged) and porn among other things was becoming more prevalent on the site, they didn’t feel comfortable having an official affiliation with Reddit, even if it was only with one sub.
The protest worked in a way, but I wouldn’t give Microsoft credit for actually backing the protests.
I give them tons of credit for this! With Twitter becoming, in my opinion, basically a Nazi echo chamber, the corporate brands and public personalities staying on the platform basically lends it legitimacy. It says “it’s normal to hang out in public places where hate groups thrive and are encouraged”. Microsoft making this choice is sending a public message that Reddit’s conduct is making the place unsafe - that it’s not perfectly normal to hang out in the subreddit that are lacking moderation.
It’s not necessarily a perfect comparison because I think Twitter’s leadership is directly doing things to promote harmful and hateful content, whereas reddit I think is just hurting it’s relationship with its own community, but the throughline is the lack of moderation making the content more extreme.
This was my first thought too, it’s definitely what their language was indicating.
I’ve been looking for this kind of comment, because this was my first thought on reading the statement. Very PR speak implying that the state of subs like r/interestingasfuck meant that they didn’t want the brand risk that now comes with being on Reddit – not that they cared about or were protesting the API changes.
I do think it’s interesting because it shows that the mod protests on those subreddits - even if brief - triggered a big enough brand risk moment for MSFT/Minecraft to decide dropping Reddit completely (rather than temporarily or similar) was worth it. I don’t think we’ve seen any other brands officially do that yet.