“All posts must be images of John Oliver looking sexy.”

All posts on r/pics and r/gifs must now be about comedian and Last Week Tonight host John Oliver after users voted.

  • BradleyUffner@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17·
    1 year ago

    It’s funny, but I don’t quite get the point of this. If you are boycotting Reddit then you shouldn’t be going there to post about things. If you ARE going there, you are no longer boycotting. Reddit doesn’t care what you post about. You are still participating in the site. It’s just driving traffic back to Reddit, which harms the cause.

    • LazaroFilm@kbin.social
      15·
      1 year ago

      Lowering the quality of the content means that sure they’ll get a surge of viewers to see the ruins, but then people will leave sure to the lack of valuable content. This is the idea behind it. If Reddit is forcing to stop the blackout, the removing the content value is the next thing. Sure you can boycott, but the amount of people that land on a Reddit page from a SEO or don’t know/care about the blackout are still significant. If those people have no reason to get to a Reddit page then the damage to Reddit becomes critical.

    • crowsby@kbin.social
      11·
      1 year ago

      If you show up to vote in a poll and immediately bounce, then yes you’ll show up in their Daily Active User count. But it’s a vanity metric. The important thing is posts viewed /session length, since that’s what matters more for serving up ads, and also contributing content.

      I suspect this may be a more impactful protest than simply blacking out, because in the case of blackouts the front page algorithm will find content to spoonfeed users from other subs. On the other hand, if the top subs are flooding the feed with inane posts and upvoting them all, I suspect that’s more likely to drive away casual users and really impact the $$$ metrics.