[ElevenLathe]

That makes sense to me. It would be one variant of a larger theory of "a subreddit going private is an expensive process that is poorly optimized because it's normally so rare". Another variant would be that clicking the "go private" button might do something like start a huge cascade of queries/calls to mutate the status of individual posts and comments (and possibly hence also trigger the massive cache invalidation you mentioned). Possibly also "going private" infra, whatever it is, is some bespoke snowflake that doesn't autoscale (since it's never needed to and there was always something better to be doing with engineering time, or people just forgot).

One theory I have seen floated but which seems unlikely to me is that this was some kind of internal sabotage. I could maybe buy this if the protest was about a war or human rights issue or something, but I really don't think any IT pros would be willing to risk jail time for this one.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

Would a better protest be rapidly switching subreddits from public/private?

[joecot]

A better protest would have been for the moderators to all stop moderating. Turn off their automod filters, allow all posts. Show reddit what happens when their volunteer moderators just stop.

[graypegg]

I still think this is coming. After the 48hr strike, how many mods are going to turn their sub back to public, look at their mod inbox filled with confused and angry users, and then see some pending non-response from Reddit post-strike, and wonder why they do this?

[stale2002]

The problem with this strategy is that it gives reddit a valid excuse to remove subreddit mods.

Having your sub be unmoderated is against reddit TOS, whereas taking a sub private is not yet against the official TOS.

Process and technicalities like this matter a lot and can effect a platforms actions.

[joecot]

I agree that taking the subs private for 48 hours is a good first step. And I agree that subs staying private indefinitely is a good next step.

But if neither make headway, just going unmoderated is the logical next step. Yeah, reddit could take over moderating the subreddits. They can also do that if they're set private. But they don't want to. They outsourced that to volunteer moderators so they could get free labor. If they want to run their own moderation, and submit their own content, the reddit corporation can have fun with that.

[pessimizer]

You never want to threaten people with a good time.

[kadoban]

From Reddit corporate's perspective, all of their free-labor mods disappearing is _not_ "a good time".

Really shouldn't be anyone's idea of a good time.

[red-iron-pine]

every sub would then be nothing but onlyfans ads or similar spam

[falcolas]

Too easy to shut down, since there's a finite number of mod enabled accounts.

[commandlinefan]

> to mutate the status of individual posts and comment

AKA why you should normalize your data models.

[ElevenLathe]

Meh it's a tradeoff usually. De-normalize for better read performance at the expense of some complexity and worse update performance/semantics.

[eropple]

This is true, but FWIW (it probably wouldn't save you here, too much is changing too fast) something like a SQL materialized view can very often give you both the chocolate and the peanut butter.