[arugulum]

This really should be it. Open up but slowly deteriorate the experience.

Here's a concrete proposal: Set automod to delete any post/comment longer than 20 characters.

This makes discussion virtually impossible, and starts to impact the quality of Reddit posts. With enough subs cooperating (e.g. the subs that went private over the blackout), it'd already be making a serious impact on the usage experience of Reddit. Furthermore, this policy can be enacted indefinitely without stopping the "regular operation" of Reddit (i.e. mods can sit on this policy for as long as they need to, as opposed to the blackout which even from the start was planned with a time limit.)

[optimalsolver]

Mod team will be gone by tomorrow morning if they try that.

Sounds like Reddit has ran out of patience.

[oAlbe]

Yeah it was very patient of them to allow all those people to create, curate and moderate content on their platform at no cost to reddit.

[pg_1234]

Don't be restrictive, be overly permissive.

Let through offensive porn, copyright infringement, spyware, trojans.

There are hyper active pervert/malware communities out there who will eagerly assist.

This path opens Reddit the Corp up to lawsuits and regulatory oversight and does far more lasting damage.

[ahahahahah]

This is actually a great example that justifies reddit's push to allow communities to remove their moderators if they are doing things so egregiously abusive to the community.