He plans to make moderators popularly elected to more easily vote them out.

I totally second this idea. The last time we tried to get the internet to seriously decide on something we got Boaty McBoatface.

Hopes the next frontier will be subreddits as businesses.

Even better. All posts in these subs can be advertisements, perfect.

He does not want Reddit employees to take on the work. Moderator hours were valued at 3.2 million last year, 3% of reddit’s revenue.

Yeah, don't even spend 3% of revenues as a cost of doing business. The soon-to-be-community-elected mods will do it for free. Super.

popular elections in an ecosystem 1/4 bots, in which the admins hold ultimate unilateral authority.

come work for free

No thanks

builds an entire self-hosted instance of an open source, federated social media network...

Oh you want to have popular elections for mods? Do it, see what happens. Poll crashing is a fucking sport.

Oh yeah, and:

“If you’re a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. So a politician needs to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by its shareholders,” he said.

CEO of a company doesn't even understand business ownership. Business owners cannot be fired. They can be bought out. Shareholders are owners. C-level employees are almost universally also owners. Nobody can just "take away" ownership; it has to be bought, and an owner of property is the person who gets to decide whether to sell it or not. What an idiot.

Is the CEO going to be popularly elected too?

While undeniably shitty, how amazing would it be if after instituting popular voting on mods more subreddits voted to go private? Not likely but it is tempting

Honestly like, if he makes it so mods can be popularly elected/unelected, well, he's gonna end up with the other sort of Reddit protestor -- the feral shitposters -- tearing down every mod on the whole page. I assume he would have to reverse that policy at exactly the moment he gets rid of his ... enemies, I guess? -- or else ViolentAcrezMAGAEdition is gonna be running r/worldnews with Roger Stone.

He can stuff the votes with bots and get what he wants. Don't think for a second that he'll let people like you and I succeed at voting out mods who are on his side.

He referred to the mods as landed gentry, which is such a gross and lazy way to try to get people on his side. It has a major flaw too: mods are unpaid, the whole idea behind gentry is that they make money from owning their land.

Let me help you out spez, you piece of shit, if you want to criticize the millions of dollars of unpaid work that mods do for their communities try comparing them to an HOA committee, that at least has a kernel of truth.

Smart move, it will definitely makes me go back to Reddit.
To vote for moderators who don’t want to end the protest.

Can we vote for the admins too?

Lol this is gonna be awful

FUCKING LOL he's seething

What an ass. I hope this gets some mods still over there to move here.

No way we're gonna see reddit elections and campaigns this is hilarious

Thank you for the article, but can we talk about the eye-cancer that MSN has de-evolved into?

I click on the link, see the first 3 lines of the article (that I cannot actually click on to read the rest) followed up with an infinite wall of ads and "other articles you may enjoy".

Doesn't matter what changes he makes I'm never going back to that site that it's filled with karma farmers, bots and onlyfans spamers

I’ll go back to reddit for a day to vote him off of r/programming

So you do all that work for nothing just to be able to be voted out? 😂

I'm betting it will not be one account one vote. He'll stack the deck, just wait.

Even if it is one account one vote, the bot armies will be there to ensure the outcome the admins want. Moderator puppets to do the will of the admin team, fuck us pleb slobs that are the community and make his shitty site worth visiting.

subreddits as businesses

I'll admit, I didn't have faith that he could, but he actually came up with a worse idea

tone deaf much?

The correct response is scorched earth, time to delete the protesting subreddits. the CEO has zero respect for those folks who built those community’s, might as well help remove the actual value of reddit.

After debating for a few days and watching u/spez spiral even further out of reality. I nuked my account. All comments and posts edited to gibberish and then deleted followed by my account.