[jake_morrison]

This is such a baffling failure to understand how social networks function (see the 1% rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule).

They are alienating the most engaged users who provide the content and pissing off the moderators who provide free service to keep the communities running. Replacing passionate moderators working for free with disinterested paid staff will reduce quality and significantly increase costs.

[p3rls]

Eh, I use paid staff to maintain my website that's sorta like a subreddit + a database attached. Would I rather these people work for free? No-- because it's a lot of stressful bullshit doing this kinda stuff. Instead of working for free it's just very low paying -- I can sleep at night though (and as a bonus I don't have to worry about stuff like this)

[edgyquant]

I would really like to see some stats that backup this 1% rule in the age of social media. Your wiki link cites research from 2012 which is before the real social media boom. Seems to apply to Internet forums in the 2000s and doesn’t account for gamification etc that we’ve seen since.

[deminature]

There's an article explaining it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule. Of any social network, typically 1% are the power users, 9% are intermittent contributors and 90% are lurkers.

[johnnyanmac]

believe it or not, I bet it got worse in the age of social media. There's more content creators now, but also a LOT more people browsing social media.

[gremlinsinc]

pick 10 commenters randomly who are obviously not really supportive of the protest, ie they are going to stick around and aren't the demographic affected, then pick 10 content posters in subs that protested. Look at their karma and number of posts and report back.

Average ppl on Reddit rarely post content, usually plenty of comments, just not content.

If all the content producers leave then you get the same effect as if the subs were still dark.